Planning and simulating forest landscape restoration in a mixed-ownership landscape under climate change

Climate change will likely alter northern forest community composition due to differential shifts in tree species ranges.  However, projected effects must consider the interaction of climate change with forest management and other ecosystem processes known to exert considerable influence on patterns of community composition. We used a spatially explicit forest ecosystem model, LANDIS-II, to simulate the effects of climate change, natural disturbance, and forest management on a 2 million ha landscape in northeastern Minnesota that lies in the transition zone between temperate and boreal forests. Our objectives were to determine the future viability of existing regional conservation plans and to assess how alternative forest management strategies could change trajectories of climate induced alterations to forest composition. Data from the third Hadley Climate Centre global circulation model under high and low emissions projections were used to create two climate change scenarios.  A third scenario assumed current climate conditions. Climate scenarios were simulated with three different forest management scenarios: no forest management, continuation of current management, and an alternative management scenario with longer mean rotation ages, more uneven aged management, more landowner coordination and larger, more clustered, clearcuts. Results revealed that forest composition is strongly affected by both harvesting and climate change, although several species will be lost from the region irrespective of management activity. The alternative management scenario produced the lowest magnitude of compositional change. The risk of regional species loss was higher in simulations of current management and no management. However, in the current management scenario there were localized regions where the extent of compositional change was less pronounced relative to the no management scenario. These results suggest that forest management has the potential to either exacerbate or reduce the effects of climate change and substantiates the need to integrate the emerging threat of climate change into regional conservation plans.