Narratives and practices for climate change adaptation in a forest dieback context. Case study of the Doller Valley in the mid-mountain massif of Vosges (Haut-Rhin, France).
Assigned Session: FS 3.191: Forest recovery after disturbance: Challenges and opportunities for the management of mountain forests
Abstract ID: 3.11834 | Not reviewed | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA
Sandrine Allain (1)
Marc, Girard (2)
(1) Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement, 2 rue de la Papeterie, 38402 Saint Martin d'Hères, FR
(2) Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement, Route d'Amance, 54280 Champenoux, FRANCE
Abstract
The Doller Valley (Vosges massif, France) forests have experimented drastic landscape changes in the recent years due to tree diebacks and bark beetles’ attacks. These concrete manifestations of climate change, although multifactorial, have become structuring events and impacted both forest management practices as well as people’s expectations about the forest. For some, wood production is no longer necessarily the main objective and maintaining a forested landscape providing diverse ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration or recreation becomes just as important. Like expectations, silvicultural practices are also changing. The region, and particularly the mid-mountain massif of Vosges, have a tradition of natural regeneration but foresters are now experimenting a wider range of management practices considering that the adaptive potential of local stands is put into question. At the same time, planting and the use of Southerner species, although largely encouraged and subsidized at national level, has low hindsight. Therefore, the nature and level of interventions foresters implement vary, while they are constrained by the capacity of other key actors of the forest sector – nurseries, cooperatives, forest workers – to integrate these new demands. We implemented transdisciplinary research involving ethnographic methods, socio-ecological system analyses, participatory workshops, and surveys among forest owners and managers, in order to gain more insights into the way forest stakeholders adapt to climate change in this context. Our enquiry is twofold: a first level of analysis is about the narratives of social-ecological adaptation; a second level of analysis is that of forest renewal practices. We expect to map out a diversity of narratives and question the values and social relations to the forest they embed. Because narratives hold a socio-technical dimension, we will also put to light the different management practices aimed at ensuring forest renewal, with a special emphasis on how forest managers elaborate and legitimize their strategies. We expect to produce a picture of the socio-technical and socio-ecological underpinnings of forest renewal dynamics in a vulnerable forest area, and show the interplay of ideological and empirical changes about mid-mountain forests.
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