Ecosystem services and biodiversity in production forests; synergies and conflicts

Main funder

Funder's project number: 275329

Funds granted by main funder (€)

Funding program

Project timetable

Project start date: 01/09/2014

Project end date: 31/08/2018

Summary

The ability of ecosystems to simultaneously provide ecosystem services and maintain biological diversity has become the central issue in the sustainable use of natural resources. Despite immense research attention to ecosystem services and biodiversity during the past decade, our understanding of the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem processes and provision of services remains fairly obscure. We do not know much about when to expect trade-offs or synergies or how to minimize trade-offs and enhance synergies. Moreover, our capacity of putting this knowledge into practice is limited. In this project we 1) measure and map synergies and conflicts among alternative ecosystem services boreal forest landscapes can produce and 2) study how management for cosystem services affects the capacity of the landscape to maintain biodiversity. 3) We further aim at revealing forest management plans that would provide optimal solutions to potential conflicts across the full array of considered objectives (ecosystem services and biodiversity). We consider a wide set of valuable ecosystem provisioning, regulating and cultural services boreal forest can provide (e.g. timber, game, collectable forest goods, carbon storage, recreational values). We consider alternative aspects of biodiversity including habitat availability for indicator and umbrella species, availability of critical resources, and plant species richness. Our analysis on ecosystem services and biodiversity will likely produce an array of efficient combinations of management regimes, i.e. a set of Pareto-ptimal plans. To assist decision makers in selecting a plan for implementation, 4) we develop decision support tools that would help putting into practice the results from our analysis. This tool will help in multi-objective planning for efficient management of forest resources. We will compile forest stand data from two large forest landscapes (tens of km2) from southern Finland both containing tens of thousands of stands that have attributes determining their contribution to ecosystem services and biodiversity. All stands in this landscape will be simulated 50 yrs into the future using MOTTI stand simulator. Simulations will be carried out with seven alternative management regimes ranging from the current management recommendations to total set-aside. In developing the decision support tools we will use the IND-NIMBUS platform developed by our team members for industrial problems.

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