Assessing forest landscape naturalness under future climate change and disturbances in the Italian Alps
Assigned Session: FS 3.206: The Future of Mountain Forests
Abstract ID: 3.12062 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA
Marco Mina (1)
Sebastian, Marzini (1, 2); Katharina, Albrich (3)
(1) Eurac Research, viale Druso 1, 39100 Bolzano/Bozen, IT
(2) Free University of Bolzano, Faculty of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences, , Piazza Università 5, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
(3) Natural Resources Institute Finland, Forest Health and Biodiversity Group, Latokartanonkaari 9, Helsinki 00790, Finland
Abstract
Mountain forests have been strongly shaped by past human activities. Their current conditions often diverge greatly from the expected natural vegetation in terms of structure and composition. Generally, aiming at higher naturalness levels in forest ecosystems is preferred, as a more natural forest present higher level of ecosystem functioning. However, it is not clear whether a more natural forest landscape would be less prone to natural disturbances and whether they would better support the provision of multiple ecosystem services to human society. In our study, we addressed this question in a large mountain territory in the Italian Alps. We applied a process-based forest landscape model to determined the naturalness of a forest landscape in South Tyrol. We estimated the long-term potential natural vegetation of the region and compared with current forest conditions using a spatially-explicit naturalness index. Successively, we simulated future forest development of both the natural and the current landscape under combination of climate change scenarios and forest disturbances, which allowed us to compare the vulnerability of the two landscapes to future disturbances by analysing stand structure. Our results showed that the current forest presented a low naturalness due to diverging species composition between the current and natural forest landscape, particularly at low elevations. Nevertheless, higher naturalness levels were observed in subalpine forests. Natural disturbances such as wind and bark beetle impacted the natural and current forest landscape differently. While the current landscape showed to be more vulnerable to bark beetle outbreaks, further amplified by climate change, the natural landscape was more prone to wind disturbances, indicating a higher vulnerability of forests in which successional stages development were driven by natural dynamics only. Our study presented a first attempt of assessing forest naturalness using spatially-explicit dynamic modelling. As disturbances are expected to increase in the future, our results showed that aiming at more natural forest ecosystem might not be the best option under anthropogenic climate change. Management interventions should focus on lowering the future forest vulnerability by prioritizing interventions strategically across mountain forest landscapes.
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