PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 47: Insights, challenges, and future directions in modeling forest dynamics at multiple scales
Organizer(s): C Tripler, C Canham, C Messier, and M Papaik
Thursday, August 11, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 510a, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Modeling regional implications of local forest management decisions.
Spies, Thomas*,1, Johnson, Norman2, Pabst, Robert2, Bettinger, Pete3, Garman, Steven4, 1 USDA Forest Service, PNW Research Station, Corvallis, OR2 Oregon State University, College of Forestry, Corvallis, OR3 University of Georgia, Warnell School of Forest Resources, Athens, GA4 National Park Service, Canyonlands National Park, Moab, UT
ABSTRACT- In recent years, new forest policies for public and private lands have been implemented to address biodiversity concerns in the Pacific Northwest. However, no research has been done to evaluate the extent to which these policies can reach their goals, or the effects of policies that emerge at large scales. Our objectives were to project the ecological and socio-economic effects of forest management policies for 100 years at multiple spatial scales across the entire Coast Range of Oregon. This mountainous physiographic province of 2.5 million ha includes a mosaic of landowners whose goals range from wilderness to high-production forestry. We developed a scheduling model, the LAndscape Management and Policy Simulator (LAMPS) to utilize output from an existing ecological forest gap model and other vegetation models to project forest conditions under different policies. This system of models was designed to: (1) simulate traditional and novel stand-level practices and processes (e.g. clearcutting, thinning, underplanting, fertilization, green-tree and snag retention, old-growth stand development) with a spatial resolution of less than 0.1 ha; (2) characterize high levels of variability in initial and projected forest stand structure and composition across all ownerships; (3) simulate processes of tree regeneration, stand development, natural gap disturbances, and woody debris production and decay, and effects of seed availability; (4) produce credible estimates of timber production for high-yield management practices; (5) simulate vegetation components needed to drive wildlife and fish habitat models. The process of developing an integrated multi-scale forest management model has been extremely challenging. For example, it has been especially difficult to develop stand models that adequately represent both high-yield forest management and new silvicultural approaches for biodiversity goals. It has also been challenging to represent the behavior of forestland owners, when they have considerable freedom to pursue their goals. The complexity of the approach also makes it difficult to conduct sensitivity analyses or to evaluate a numerous of alternative scenarios. Despite these challenges the model has been useful in identifying the potential effects of forest management at broad spatial scales.
Key words: policy, Oregon, biodiversity, simulation