Analysis of the interactions of climate change and management on forest biomass using the Ecosystem Demography 2.0 model

Lucien Fitzpatrick and Christine R Rollinson, Center for Tree Science, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL, Ankur R Desai, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, UW-Madison, Michael C. Dietze, Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA

Background/Question/Methods
Forest management practices have large impacts on ecosystem health, composition, and services. However, the impacts of different management regimes on forest resilience and ecosystem services will shift as climate change alters the forest structure and composition (e.g. growth, mortality, recruitment) in new ways. The impact of different management on biomass is particularly important to oak restoration efforts in oak woodlands. We performed a case study of four management options for oak restoration via biomass reduction at a site in the midwest: no active management, gap clearing, shelterwood harvest, and understory thinning. We conducted a modeling experiment to test for interactions between forest management and climate change effects in an oak woodland at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, IL using the Ecosystem Demography 2.0 model (ED2). We used 12 downscaled future climate models with 2 emissions scenarios from CMIP5 to evaluate and attribute the changes in total above-ground biomass under 4 different restoration harvest strategies performed as harvesting in the first 5 years of the simulation. We evaluated the interactive impacts of climate and forest management on aboveground biomass, species composition, and ecosystem stability.
Results/Conclusions
Forest model simulations from 2020-2099 displayed high levels of temporal variability and variability among management and climate scenarios through time. Regression analysis on change in aboveground biomass over the 80 years post-harvest found additive rather than interactive effects of management scheme and temperature change. Lack of management effects on sensitivity to temperature change suggest that warming annual temperatures may not impact the effects of management in our system and vice versa. Next steps will include analysis of additional ecosystem services, alternate forest management schemes, and replication of the analyses in other forest types and regions