The FORECO project is part of the ForestValue EraNet, fundings started on 1/07/2022. It can be seen as a follow-up to the FOREXCLIM project.





Overview
- European forests play a key role in the provision of ecosystem services, but they are under increasing pressure from a changing climate, altered disturbance regimes, and past management legacies.
- The aim of our project is to provide tools for identifying and operationalizing sustainable and multifunctional forest use and management strategies, which simultaneously consider ecological and economic risks arising from biotic and abiotic threats in the coming decades (i.e. drought, storm, bark beetles) and take into account forest recovery from disturbances.
- Our methodology includes a combination of ground-based inventories, remote sensing, a process-based ecosystem model (LPJ-GUESS), and a multi-objective, risk-sensitive optimization model (YAFO).
Work packages
- WP1 consists of project management and coordination.
- WP2 focuses on transnational dissemination activities and communication between scientists and stakeholders.
- WP3 assesses the role of forest structure in modulating biotic and abiotic disturbances characteristics (i.e. occurrence probability, size, severity). Our approach will establish empirical relationships between Lidar-derived metrics of forest structure and a Landsat-based European disturbance map developed by Senf and Seidl (2021) for selected areas. We will then extend these relationships to the European level, taking advantage of national forest inventory data, and project changes in forest vulnerability to disturbances in the future under moderate climate change scenarios for different management regimes, using the process-based model LPJ-GUESS.
- WP4 attributes disturbance agents to observed canopy disturbance events. For this goal, we will use recent developments of LPJ-GUESS, including process-based representation of storm damage, drought, and bark beetles, and the updated parameterization from WP3.
- WP5 characterizes recovery patterns after disturbance events at the European scale, by combining remotely-sensed spectral indicators with ground-based inventories of regeneration, and identifies the main environmental and management drivers of recovery success and rate.
- WP6 projects management scenarios into the future and derives optimized management strategies for provision of ecosystem services, taking into account forest vulnerability to future disturbances and recovery from them.
