Long-Term Impacts of Forest Management Practices under Climate Change on Structure, Composition, and Fragmentation of the Canadian Boreal Landscape
| Autor: | Eliana Molina, Osvaldo Valeria, Maxence Martin, Miguel Montoro Girona, Jorge Andrés Ramirez |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Forests; Volume 13; Issue 8; Pages: 1292 |
| ISSN: | 1999-4907 |
| DOI: | 10.3390/f13081292 |
| Popis: | Forest harvesting and fire are major disturbances in boreal forests. Forest harvesting has modified stand successional pathways, which has led to compositional changes from the original conifer-dominated forests to predominantly mixed and hardwood forests. Boreal fire regimes are expected to change with future climate change. Using the LANDIS-II spatially explicit landscape model, we evaluated the effects of forest management scenarios and projected fire regimes under climate change in northeastern Canadian boreal forests, and we determined the subsequent alteration in stand- and landscape-level composition, succession, and spatial configuration of boreal forests. We observed that, in contrast to successional pathways that followed fire, successional pathways that followed forest harvesting favored mixed forests with a prevalence of shade-intolerant hardwoods for up to 300 y after harvesting. This trend was exacerbated under climate change scenarios where forests became dominated by hardwood species, particularly in ecoregions where these species were found currently in low abundance. Our results highlight the failure of existing forest management regimes to emulate the effects of natural disturbance regimes on boreal forest composition and configuration. This illustrates the risks to maintaining ecosystem goods and services over the long term and the exacerbation of this trend in the context of future climate change. Funding: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant number 125559117), GreenFirst, and West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the Quebec Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks) and its forest inventory department for providing the digital inventory data to calibrate LANDIS-II. The Sustainable Forest Management UQAT/UQAM Chair (SFM Chair) also helped this project by providing all technical support. We thank Dominic Cyr for their helpful comments and suggestions for this study. We are also grateful to Johana Herrera and Javier Peinado for the compilation and construction of some of the input data sets and to Thomas A. Gavin and Murray Hay for the English revision. This manuscript is part of the Ph.D. thesis of Eliana Cristina Molina at the University of Quebec in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. A version of this manuscript is available online at depositium.uqat.ca. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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