research topics in forest management

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Forestry is the study and practice of the cultivation and management of woodland. Forests provide goods and services such as timber, recreation and carbon sequestration.

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• Review Paper
• Open access
• Published: 14 January 2015

Climate change impacts and adaptation in forest management: a review

• Rodney J. Keenan 1  

Annals of Forest Science volume  72 ,  pages 145–167 ( 2015 ) Cite this article

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Key message

Adaptation of forest management to climate change requires an understanding of the effects of climate on forests, industries and communities; prediction of how these effects might change over time; and incorporation of this knowledge into management decisions. This requires multiple forms of knowledge and new approaches to forest management decisions. Partnerships that integrate researchers from multiple disciplines with forest managers and local actors can build a shared understanding of future challenges and facilitate improved decision making in the face of climate change.

Climate change presents significant potential risks to forests and challenges for forest managers. Adaptation to climate change involves monitoring and anticipating change and undertaking actions to avoid the negative consequences and to take advantage of potential benefits of those changes.

This paper aimed to review recent research on climate change impacts and management options for adaptation to climate change and to identify key themes for researchers and for forest managers.

The study is based on a review of literature on climate change impacts on forests and adaptation options for forest management identified in the Web of Science database, focusing on papers and reports published between 1945 and 2013.

One thousand one hundred seventy-two papers were identified in the search, with the vast majority of papers published from 1986 to 2013. Seventy-six percent of papers involved assessment of climate change impacts or the sensitivity or vulnerability of forests to climate change and 11 % (130) considered adaptation. Important themes from the analysis included (i) predicting species and ecosystem responses to future climate, (ii) adaptation actions in forest management, (iii) new approaches and tools for decision making under uncertainty and stronger partnerships between researchers and practitioners and (iv) policy arrangements for adaptation in forest management.

Conclusions

Research to support adaptation to climate change is still heavily focused on assessing impacts and vulnerability. However, more refined impact assessments are not necessarily leading to better management decisions. Multi-disciplinary research approaches are emerging that integrate traditional forest ecosystem sciences with social, economic and behavioural sciences to improve decision making. Implementing adaptation options is best achieved by building a shared understanding of future challenges among different institutions, agencies, forest owners and stakeholders. Research-policy-practice partnerships that recognise local management needs and indigenous knowledge and integrate these with climate and ecosystem science can facilitate improved decision making.

1 Introduction

Anthropogenic climate change presents potential risks to forests and future challenges for forest managers. Responding to climate change, through both mitigation and adaptation, may represent a paradigm shift for forest managers and researchers (Schoene and Bernier 2012 ). Climate change is resulting in increasing air temperature and changing precipitation regimes, including changes to snowfall and to the timing, amount and inter-annual variability of rainfall (IPCC 2013 ). Forests are widespread, long-lived ecosystems that are both intensively and extensively managed. They are potentially sensitive to these longer term climatic changes, as are the societies and economies that depend on them (Bernier and Schöne 2009 ). Climate change increases the potential consequences of many existing challenges associated with environmental, social or economic change.

Whilst forest ecosystems are resilient and many species and ecosystems have adapted historically to changing conditions, future changes are potentially of such magnitudes or will occur at rates that are beyond the natural adaptive capacity of forest species or ecosystems, leading to local extinctions and the loss of important functions and services, including reduced forest carbon stocks and sequestration capacity (Seppälä et al. 2009 ).

Recent global warming has already caused many changes in forests (Lucier et al. 2009 ). Aspects of climate change may be positive for some tree species in some locations. Tree growth is observed to be increasing in some locations under longer growing seasons, warmer temperatures and increased levels of CO 2 . However, many projected future changes in climate and their indirect effects are likely to have negative consequences for forests. Observed shifts in vegetation distribution (Kelly and Goulden 2008 ; Lenoir et al. 2010 ) or increased tree mortality due to drought and heat in forests worldwide (Allen et al. 2010 ) may not be due to human-induced climate change but demonstrate the potential impacts of rapid climate change. These impacts may be aggravated by other human-induced environmental changes such as increases in low elevation ozone concentrations, nitrogenous pollutant deposition, the introduction of exotic insect pests and pathogens, habitat fragmentation and increased disturbances such as fire (Bernier and Schöne 2009 ). Other effects of climate change may also be important for forests. Sea level rise is already impacting on tidal freshwater forests (Doyle et al. 2010 ) and tidal saltwater forests (mangroves) are expanding landward in sub-tropical coastal reaches taking over freshwater marsh and forest zones (Di Nitto et al. 2014 ).

With projected future change, species ranges will expand or contract, the geographic location of ecological zones will shift, forest ecosystem productivity will change and ecosystems could reorganise following disturbances into ecological systems with no current analogue (Campbell et al. 2009 ; Fischlin et al. 2009 ). Forests types differ in their sensitivity to climatic change. Bernier and Schöne ( 2009 ) considered boreal, mountain, Mediterranean, mangrove and tropical moist forests most vulnerable to climate change. However, there has been recent debate about the vulnerability of tropical moist forests (Corlett 2011 ; Huntingford et al. 2013 ; Feeley et al. 2012 ), and temperate forests in areas subject to drier climates may be more at risk (Choat et al. 2012 ).

Adapting to these changing and uncertain future conditions can be considered from a number of perspectives (McEvoy et al. 2013 ). Policy and management might be directed at avoiding or reducing the impact of climate-related events, reducing vulnerability to future climatic conditions, managing a broader suite of climate ‘risks’ or increasing resilience and capacity in forest ecological and production systems to recover from climate ‘shocks’.

Adapting forest management to climate change involves monitoring and anticipating change and undertaking actions to avoid the negative consequences or take advantage of potential benefits of those changes (Levina and Tirpak 2006 ). Adopting the principles and practices of sustainable forest management (SFM) can provide a sound basis for addressing the challenges of climate change. However, Innes et al. ( 2009 ) pointed out that our failure to implement the multi-faceted components of sustainable forest management in many forests around the world is likely to limit capacity to adapt to climate change. Forest managers will need to plan at multiple spatial and temporal scales and adopt more adaptive and collaborative management approaches to meet future challenges.

Whilst forest managers are accustomed to thinking in long time scales—considering the long-term implications of their decisions and factoring in uncertainty and unknowns into management—many are now responding to much shorter term social or economic imperatives. Local forestry practices are often based on an implicit assumption that local climate conditions will remain constant (Guariguata et al. 2008 ). Other social and economic changes will also continue to drive changes in forest management (Ince et al. 2011 ). For example, a growing global population, rapid economic development and increased wealth are driving demand for food and fibre crops and forest conversion to agriculture in many developing countries (Gibbs et al. 2010 ). Climate change mitigation objectives are increasing demands for wood-based bioenergy and the use of wood in construction and industrial systems. Increasing urbanisation is changing the nature of social demands on forests, and decreasing rural populations is limiting the availability of labour and capacity for intensive forest management interventions.

Ecosystem-based adaptation is being promoted as having the potential to incorporate sustainable management, conservation and restoration of ecosystems into adaptation to climate change (IUCN 2008 ). This can be achieved more effectively by integrating ecosystem management and adaptation into national development policies through education and outreach to raise societal awareness about the value of ecosystem services (Vignola et al. 2009 ).

Kimmins ( 2002 ) invoked the term ‘future shock’, first coined by Toffler ( 1970 ) to describe the situation where societal expectations from forests were changing faster than the institutional capacity for change in forest management organisations. The pace of climate change is likely to intensify this phenomenon. Empirically based management based on traditional ‘evidence-based’ approaches therefore will potentially not develop quickly enough for development of effective future management options. How can managers consider rapid change and incorporate the prospect of very different, but uncertain, future climatic conditions into their management decisions? What types of tools are needed to improve decision making capacity?

This study aimed to review the literature on studies to support forest management in a changing climate. It builds on the major review of Seppala ( 2009 ), in particular Chapter 6 of that report by Innes et al. ( 2009 ).

The study involved a systematic assessment of the literature based on the database Web of Science (Thomson-Reuters 2014 ), an online scientific citation indexing service that provides the capacity to search multiple databases, allowing in-depth exploration of the literature within an academic or scientific discipline.

The following search terms were used in the titles of publications:

(forest* or tree* or (terrestrial and ecosystem)) and climat* and (adapt* or impact* or effect* or respons*) and

(forest* or tree*) and climat* and vulnerabilit* or sensitivit*)

The search was restricted to publications between 1945 and 2013. References related solely to climate change mitigation were excluded, as were references where the word ‘climate’ simply referred to a study in a particular climatic zone. This left a database of 1172 publications for analyses (a spreadsheet of the papers revealed in the search can be obtained from the author). References were classified into various types of studies and different regions, again based on the titles. Not all papers identified in the search are referenced. The selection of themes for discussion and papers for citation was a subjective one, based on scanning abstracts and results from relevant individual papers. The focus was important themes from key papers and literature from the last 5 years. The review includes additional papers not revealed in the search relating to these themes including selected papers from the literature in the year 2014.

Of the published papers relating to climate impacts or adaptation selected for analysis, the vast majority of papers were published from 1986 onwards. The earliest paper dated from 1949 (Gentilli 1949 ) analysing the effects of trees on climate, water and soil. Most studies prior to 1986 (and even some published later) focused on the effects of trees on local or wider regional climate (Lal and Cummings 1979 ; Otterman et al. 1984 ; Bonan et al. 1992 ), the implications of climate variability (Hansenbristow et al. 1988 ; Ettl and Peterson 1995 ; Chen et al. 1999 ), studies of tree and forest responses across climatic gradients (Grubb and Whitmore 1966 ; Bongers et al. 1999 ; Davidar et al. 2007 ) or responses to historical climate (Macdonald et al. 1993 ; Huntley 1990 ; Graumlich 1993 ).

One thousand twenty-six papers specifically addressed future climate change (rather than historical climate or gradient analysis). Of these, 88 % studied impacts, effects, vulnerability or responses to climate change in tree species, forests, forest ecosystems or the forest sector (Fig.  1 ). The first study analysing the potential impacts of future climate change on terrestrial ecosystems was published in 1985 (Emanuel et al. 1985 ) with other highly cited papers soon after (Pastor and Post 1988 ; Cannell et al. 1989 ).

Publication numbers by publication year for publications relating to climate change and forests from a search of the Web of Science database to the end of 2013 (1025 in total, 896 publications studied climate change impacts, responses or vulnerability, 129 studied adaptation)

Twelve percent of papers (129) considered adaptation options, including 10 papers on adaptation in the forest sector. The first papers to focus on adaptation in the context of climate change were in 1996 with a number of papers published in that year (Kienast et al. 1996 ; Kobak et al. 1996 ; Dixon et al. 1996 ). Publications were then relatively few each year until the late 2000s with numbers increasing to 11 in 2009, 22 in 2010 and 27 in 2011. Publications on adaptation dropped to 14 papers in 2013. The ratio of adaptation-related papers has increased more recently, with 19 % of total publications on adaptation in the last 5 years. Most papers considering adaptation since the early 2000s have related to the integration of adaptation and forest management (e.g. Lindner 2000 ; Spittlehouse 2005 ; Kellomaki et al. 2008 ; Guariguata 2009 ; Bolte et al. 2009 ; Keskitalo 2011 ; Keenan 2012 ; Temperli et al. 2012 ).

Analyses of the implications of climate change for the forest sector have focused heavily on North America: Canada (Ohlson et al. 2005 ; Van Damme 2008 ; Rayner et al. 2013 ; Johnston et al. 2012 ) and the USA (Joyce et al. 1995 ; Blate et al. 2009 ; Kerhoulas et al. 2013 ); and Europe (Karjalainen et al. 2003 ; von Detten and Faber 2013 ). There has been a stronger consideration in recent years of social, institutional and policy issues (Ogden and Innes 2007b ; Kalame et al. 2011 ; Nkem et al. 2010 ; Spies et al. 2010 ; Somorin et al. 2012 ) and the assessment of adaptive capacity in forest management organisations and in society more generally (Keskitalo 2008 ; Lindner et al. 2010 ; Bele et al. 2013a ).

Regionally, there have been relatively few published journal articles on impacts or adaptation in forests in the Southern Hemisphere (Hughes et al. 1996 ; Williams 2000 ; Pinkard et al. 2010 ; Gonzalez et al. 2011 ; Mok et al. 2012 ; Breed et al. 2013 ), although there have been more studies in the grey literature for Australian forests (Battaglia et al. 2009 ; Cockfield et al. 2011 ; Medlyn et al. 2011 ; Stephens et al. 2012 ). There have been some valuable analyses for the tropics (Guariguata et al. 2008 , 2012 ; Somorin et al. 2012 ; Feeley et al. 2012 ).

Analysis of the publications identified the following key themes: (i) predicting species and ecosystem responses to future climate, (ii) adaptation actions in forest management, (iii) new approaches and tools for decision making under uncertainty and stronger partnerships between researchers and practitioners and (iv) policy arrangements for adaptation in forest management. These are discussed in more detail below.

3.1 Predicting species and ecosystem responses to future climate

Forest managers have long used climatic information in a range of ways in planning and decision making. Climate information has been used extensively to define and map vegetation types and ecological zones and for modelling habitat distributions of vertebrates and invertebrates (Daubenmire 1978 ; Pojar et al. 1987 ; Thackway and Cresswell 1992 ), for species and provenance selection (Booth et al. 1988 ; Booth 1990 ) and seed zone identification (Johnson et al. 2004 ), for forest fire weather risk assessment and fire behaviour modelling (Carvalho et al. 2008 ), for modelling forest productivity (Battaglia et al. 2004 ) and analysing the dynamics of a range of ecological processes (Anderson 1991 ; Breymeyer and Melillo 1991 ). Predicting species responses to future climate change presents a different set of challenges, involving consideration of predictions of future climate that are often outside the historical range of variability of many species. These challenges are discussed in the next section.

3.1.1 Species responses to climate

Aitken et al. ( 2008 ) argued that there were three possible fates for forest tree populations in rapidly changing climatic conditions: persistence through spatial migration to track their ecological niches, persistence through adaptation to new conditions in current locations or the extirpation of the species. Predicting the potential fate of populations in these conditions requires the integration of knowledge across biological scales from individual genes to ecosystems, across spatial scales (for example, seed and pollen dispersal distances or breadth of species ranges) and across temporal scales from the phenology of annual developmental cycle traits to glacial and interglacial cycles.

Whilst there has been widespread use of climatic information to predict future distributions in species distribution models (SDMs, Pearson and Dawson 2003 ; Attorre et al. 2008 ; Wang et al. 2012 ; Ruiz-Labourdette et al. 2013 ), understanding of the range of climatic and non-climatic factors that will determine the future range of a particular species remains limited. Many now feel that SDMs are of limited value in adaptation decision making or species conservation strategies. Some of these limitations are summarised in Table  1 .

For example, models indicate significant shifts in patterns of tree species distribution over the next century but usually without any intrinsic consideration of the biological capacity of populations to move, internal population dynamics, the extent and role of local adaptation or the effects of climate and land use (Aitken et al. 2008 ; Thuiller et al. 2008 ). In a recent study, Dobrowski et al. ( 2013 ) found that the predicted speed of movement of species to match the predicted rate of climate change appears to be well beyond the historical rates of migration. Whilst modelled outputs suggest that migration rates of 1000 m per year or higher will be necessary to track changing habitat conditions (Malcolm et al. 2002 ), actual migration rates in response to past change are generally considered to have been less than 100 m per year. This was reinforced by model predictions that incorporate species dispersal characteristics for five tree species in the eastern USA indicated very low probabilities of dispersal beyond 10–20 km from current species boundaries by 2100 (Iverson et al. 2004 ). Corlett and Westcott ( 2013 ) also argued that plant movements are not realistically represented in models used to predict future vegetation or carbon-cycle feedbacks and that fragmentation of natural systems is likely to slow migration rates.

However, these estimates do not account for the role of humans in influencing tree species distributions, which they have done for thousands of years (Clark 2007 ), and managed translocation may be an option for conserving many tree species, but there are significant unresolved technical and social questions about implementing translocation at a larger scale (Corlett and Westcott 2013 ).

Most early SDMs relied primarily on temperature envelopes to model future distribution, but factors such as precipitation and soil moisture are potentially more limiting and more important in determining distribution patterns (Dobrowski et al. 2013 ). Aitken et al. ( 2008 ) found that the degree to which variation in precipitation explains phenotypic variation among populations is greater in general for populations from continental than from maritime climates and greater for lower latitude than higher latitude populations. However, precipitation alone is often not a good predictor of variation and there is often a strong interaction with temperature (Andalo et al. 2005 ). Heat to moisture index or aridity is probably more important in determining future distribution or productivity than precipitation alone (Aitken et al. 2008 ; Harper et al. 2009 ; Wang et al. 2012 ). Soil properties (depth, texture and organic matter content) have a major influence on plant-available water, but few SDMs incorporate these.

Future precipitation is proving more difficult to model than temperature, due to the complex effects of topography, and there are more widely varying estimates between global circulation models (GCMs) of future change in precipitation (IPCC 2013 ). As such, there is more uncertainty around the extent to which moisture stress will change with warming and the extent to which natural selection pressures will change as a result. Even without changes in precipitation, increased temperatures will increase the length of growing season and potential evapotranspiration (PET) resulting in more water use over the year and greater risk plant water shortage and drought death.

Changes in the intervals of extreme events (extreme heat, cold, precipitation, humidity, wind) may also matter more than changes in the mean. Current forecasting approaches that produce future climate averages may make it difficult to detect non-linear ecosystem dynamics, or threshold effects, that could trigger abrupt ecosystem change (Campbell et al. 2009 ). Zimmermann et al. ( 2009 ) found that predictions of spatial patterns of tree species in Switzerland were improved by incorporating measures of extremes in addition to means in SDMs.

The risks of future climate will also depend on the management goal. If the aim is simply to conserve genetic diversity, risks of extinction or reduction in genetic diversity may be overstated by SDMs because much of the genetic variation within tree species is found within rather than among their populations, and the extinction of a relatively large proportion of a population is generally likely to result in relatively little overall loss of genetic diversity (Hamrick 2004 ). Local habitat heterogeneity (elevation, slope aspect, moisture, etc.) can preserve adaptive genetic variation that, when recombined and exposed to selection in newly colonised habitats, can provide for local adaptation. The longevity of individual trees can also retard population extinction and allow individuals and populations to survive until habitat recovery or because animal and wind pollination can provide levels of pollen flow that are sufficient to counteract the effects of genetic drift in fragmented populations. Consequently, widespread species with large populations, high fecundity and higher levels of phenotypic plasticity are likely to persist and adapt and have an overall greater tolerance to changing climates than predicted by SDMs (Alberto et al. 2013 ).

Tree species distributions have always been dynamic, responding to changing environmental conditions, and populations are likely to be sub-optimal for their current environments (Namkoong 2001 ; Wu and Ying 2004 ). These lag effects are important in predicting species responses to climate change. In a modelling study of Scots pine and silver birch, Kuparinen et al. ( 2010 ) predicted that after 100 years of climate change, the genotypic growth period length of both species will lag more than 50 % behind the climatically determined optimum. This lag is reduced by increased mortality of established trees, whereas earlier maturation and higher dispersal ability had comparatively minor effects. Thuiller et al. ( 2008 ) suggest that mechanisms for incorporating these ‘trailing edge’ effects into SDMs are a major area of research potential.

Trees are also capable of long-distance gene flow, which can have both adaptive evolution benefits and disadvantages. Kremer et al. ( 2012 ) found that there may be greater positive effects of gene flow for adaptation but that the balance of positive to negative consequences of gene flow differs for leading edge, core and rear sections of forest distributions.

Epigenetics—heritable changes that are not caused by changes in genetic sequences but by differences in the way DNA methylation controls the degree of gene expression—is another complicating factor in determining evolutionary response to climate change (Brautigam et al. 2013 ). For example, a recent study in Norway spruce ( Picea abies ) showed that the temperature during embryo development can dramatically affect cold hardiness and bud phenology in the offspring. In some cases, the offspring’s phenotype varied by the equivalent of 6° of latitude from what was expected given the geographic origin of the parents. It remains uncertain whether these traits are persistent, both within an individual’s lifetime and in its offspring and subsequent generations (Aitken et al. 2008 ). It is suggested that analysis of the epigenetic processes in an ecological context, or ‘ecological epigenetics’, is set to transform our understanding of the way in which organisms function in the landscape. Increased understanding of these processes can inform efforts to manage and breed tree species to help them cope with environmental stresses (Brautigam et al. 2013 ). Others argue that whilst investigating this evolutionary capacity to adapt is important, understanding responses of species to their changing biotic community is imperative (Anderson et al. 2012 ) and ‘landscape genomics’ may offer a better approach for informing management of tree populations under climate change (Sork et al. 2013 ).

These recent results indicate the importance of accounting for evolutionary processes in forecasts of the future dynamics and productivity of forests. Species experiencing high mortality rates or populations that are subject to regular disturbances such as storms or fires might actually be the quickest to adapt to a warming climate.

Species life history characteristics are also not usually well represented in most climate-based distribution models. Important factors include age to sexual maturity, fecundity, seed dispersal, competition or chilling or dormancy requirements (Nitschke and Innes 2008b ).

Competitive relationships within and between species are likely to be altered by climate change. Most models also assume open site growth conditions, rather than those within a forest, where the growth environment will be quite different. However, increased disturbance associated with climate change may create stand reinitiation conditions more often than has occurred in the past, altering competitive interactions.

Process-based models of species range shifts and ecosystem change may capture more of the life history variables and competition effects that will be important in determining responses to climate change (Kimmins 2008 ; Nitschke and Innes 2008a , b ). These can provide the basis for a more robust assessment framework that integrates biological characteristics (e.g. shade tolerance and seedling establishment) and disturbance characteristics (e.g. insect pests, drought and fire topkill). Matthews et al. ( 2011 ) integrated these factors into a decision support system that communicates uncertainty inherent in GCM outputs, emissions scenarios and species responses. This demonstrated a greater diversity among species to adapt to climate change and provides a more practical assessment of future species projections.

In summary, whilst SDMs and other climate-based modelling approaches can provide a guide to potential species responses, the extent to which future climate conditions will result in major range shifts or extinction of species is unclear and the value of this approach in adaptation and decision making is limited. The evidence from genetic studies seems to suggest that many species are reasonably robust to potential future climate change. Those with a wide geographic range, large populations and high fecundity may suffer local population extinction but are likely to persist and adapt whilst suffering adaptational lag for a few generations. For example, Booth ( 2013 ) considered that many eucalyptus species, some of which are widely planted around the world, had a high adaptive capacity even though their natural ranges are quite small.

However, large contractions or shifts in distribution could have significant consequences for different forest values and species with small populations, fragmented ranges, low fecundity or suffering declines due to introduced insects or diseases may have a higher sensitivity and are at greater risk in a changing climate (Aitken et al. 2008 ).

3.1.2 Ecosystem responses to climate

Projecting the fate of forest ecosystems under a changing climate is more challenging than for species. It has been well understood for some time that species will respond individualistically to climate change, rather than moving in concert, and that this is likely to result in ‘novel’ ecosystems, or groups of species, that are not represented in current classifications (Davis 1986 ). Forecasts need to consider the importance of these new species interactions and the confounding effects of future human activities.

Climate change affects a wide range of ecosystem functions and processes (Table  2 ). These include direct effects of temperature and precipitation on physiological and reproductive processes such as photosynthesis, water use, flowering, fruiting and regeneration, growth and mortality and litter decomposition. Changes in these processes will have effects on species attributes such as wood density or foliar nutrient status. Indirect effects will be exhibited through changing fire and other climate-driven disturbances. These will ultimately have impacts on stand composition, habitat structure, timber supply capacity, soil erosion and water yield.

Most early studies of forest ecosystem responses to climate change were built around ecosystem process models at various scales (Graham et al. 1990 ; Running and Nemani 1991 ; Rastetter et al. 1991 ). A number of recent studies have investigated the effects of past and current climate change on forest processes, often with surprising effects (Groffman et al. 2012 ).

Observed forest growth has increased recently in a number of regions, for example over the last 100 years in Europe (Pretzsch et al. 2014 ; Kint et al. 2012 ), and for more recent observations in Amazon forests (Phillips et al. 2008 ). In a major review, Boisvenue and Running ( 2006 ) found that at finer spatial scales, a trend is difficult to decipher, but globally, based on both satellite and ground-based data, climatic changes seemed to have a generally positive impact on forest productivity when water was not limiting. However, there can be a strong difference between species, complicating ecosystem level assessments (Michelot et al. 2012 ), and there are areas with little observed change (Schwartz et al. 2013 ). Generally, there are significant challenges in detecting the response of forests to climate change. For example, in the tropics, the lack of historical context, long-term growth records and access to data are real barriers (Clark 2007 ) and temperate regions also have challenges, even with well-designed, long-term experiments (Leites et al. 2012 ).

Projections of net primary productivity (NPP) under climate change indicate that there is likely to be a high level of regional variation (Zhao et al. 2013 ). Using a process model and climate scenario projections, Peters et al. ( 2013 ) predicted that average regional productivity in forests in the Great Lakes region of North America could increase from 67 to 142 %, runoff could potentially increase from 2 to 22 % and net N mineralization from 10 to 12 %. Increased productivity was almost entirely driven by potential CO 2 fertilization effects, rather than by increased temperature or changing precipitation. Productivity in these forests could shift from temperature limited to water limited by the end of the century. Reyer et al. ( 2014 ) also found strong regional differences in future NPP in European forests, with potential growth increases in the north but reduced growth in southern Europe, where forests are likely to be more water limited in the future. Again, assumptions about the impact of increasing CO 2 were a significant factor in this study.

In a different type of study using analysis of over 2400 long-term measurement plots, Bowman et al. ( 2014 ) found that there was a peaked response to temperature in temperate and sub-tropical eucalypt forests, with maximum growth occurring at a mean annual temperature of 11 °C and maximum temperature of the warmest month of 25–27 °C. Lower temperatures directly constrain growth, whilst high temperatures primarily reduced growth by reducing water availability but they also appeared to exert a direct negative effect. Overall, the productivity of Australia’s temperate eucalypt forests could decline substantially as the climate warms, given that 87 % of these forests currently experience a mean annual temperature above the ‘optimal’ temperature.

Incorporating the effects of rising CO 2 in models of future tree growth continues to be a major challenge. The sensitivity of projected productivity to assumptions regarding increased CO 2 was high in modelling studies of climate change impacts in commercial timber plantations in the Southern Hemisphere (Kirschbaum et al. 2012 ; Battaglia et al. 2009 ), and a recent analysis indicated a general convergence of different model predictions for future tree species distribution in Europe, with most of the difference between models due to the way in which this effect is incorporated (Cheaib et al. 2012 ). Increased CO 2 has been shown to increase the water-use efficiency of trees, but this is unlikely to entirely offset the effects of increased water stress on tree growth in drying climates (Leuzinger et al. 2011 ; Booth 2013 ). In general, despite studies extending over decades and improved understanding of biochemical processes (Franks et al. 2013 ), the impacts of increased CO 2 on tree and stand growth are still unresolved (Kallarackal and Roby 2012 ).

Integrating process model outputs with spatially explicit landscape models can improve understanding and projection of responses and landscape planning and this could provide for simulations of changes in ecological processes (e.g. tree growth, succession, disturbance cycles, dispersal) with other human-induced changes to landscapes (Campbell et al. 2009 ).

Investigation of current species responses to changing climate conditions may also guide improved prediction of patterns of future change in ecosystem distribution. For example, Allen et al. ( 2010 ) suggest that spatially explicit documentation of environmental conditions in areas of forest die-off is necessary to link mortality to causal climate drivers, including precipitation, temperature and vapour pressure deficit. Better prediction of climate responses will also require improved knowledge of belowground processes and soil moisture conditions. Assessments of future productivity will depend on accurate measurements of rates (net ecosystem exchange and NPP), changes in ecosystem level storage (net ecosystem production) and quantification of disturbances effects to determine net biome production (Boisvenue and Running 2006 ).

Hydrological conditions, runoff and stream flow are of critical importance for humans and aquatic organisms, and many studies have focused on the implications of climate change for these ecosystem processes. However, most of these have been undertaken at small catchment scale (Mahat and Anderson 2013 ; Neukum and Azzam 2012 ; Zhou et al. 2011 ) with few basin-scale assessments (van Dijk and Keenan 2007 ). However, the effects of climate and forest cover change on hydrology are complicated. Loss of tree cover may increase stream flow but can also increase evaporation and water loss (Guardiola-Claramonte et al. 2011 ). The extent of increasing wildfire will also be a major factor determining hydrological responses to climate change (Versini et al. 2013 ; Feikema et al. 2013 ).

Changing forest composition will also affect the habitat of vertebrate and invertebrate species. The implications of climate change for biodiversity conservation have been subject to extensive analysis (Garcia et al. 2014 ; Vihervaara et al. 2013 ; Schaich and Milad 2013 ; Clark et al. 2011 ; Heller and Zavaleta 2009 ; Miles et al. 2004 ). An integrated analytical approach, considering both impacts on species and habitat is important. For example, in a study of climate change impacts on bird habitat in the north-eastern USA, the combination of changes in tree distribution and habitat for birds resulted in significant impacts for 60 % of the species. However, the strong association of birds with certain vegetation tempers their response to climate change because localised areas of suitable habitat may persist even after the redistribution of tree species (Matthews et al. 2011 ).

Understanding thresholds in changing climate conditions that are likely to result in a switch to a different ecosystem state, and the mechanisms that underlie ecosystem responses, will be critical for forest managers (Campbell et al. 2009 ). Identifying these thresholds of change is challenging. Detailed process-based ecosystem research that identifies and studies critical species interactions and feedback loops, coupled with scenario modelling of future conditions, could provide valuable insights (Kimmins et al. 1999 , 2008 ; Walker and Meyers 2004 ). Also, rather than pushing systems across thresholds into alternative states, climate change may create a stepwise progression to unknown transitional states that track changing climate conditions, requiring a more graduated approach in management decisions (Lin and Petersen 2013 ).

Ultimately, management decisions may not be driven by whether we can determine future thresholds of change, but by observing the stressors that determine physiological limits of species distributions. These thresholds will depend on species physiology and local site conditions, with recent research demonstrating already observed ecosystem responses to climate change, including die-back of some species (Allen et al. 2010 ; Rigling et al. 2013 ).

3.1.3 Fire, pests, invasive species and disturbance risks

Many of the impacts of a changing future climate are likely to be felt through changing disturbance regimes, in particular fire. Forest fire weather risk and fire behaviour prediction have been two areas where there has been strong historical interaction between climate science and forest management and where we may see major tipping points driving change in ecosystem composition (Adams 2013 ). Fire weather is fundamentally under the control of large-scale climate conditions with antecedent moisture anomalies and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, further exacerbated by configuration of local winds, driving fire weather (Brotak and Reifsnyder 1977 ; Westerling et al. 2002 , 2006 ). It is therefore important to improve understanding of both short- and long-term atmospheric conditions in determining meteorological fire risk (Amraoui et al. 2013 ).

Increased fuel loads and changes to forest structure due to long periods of fire exclusion and suppression are increasing fire intensity and limiting capacity to control fires under severe conditions (Williams 2004 , 2013 ). Increasing urbanisation is increasing the interface between urban populations and forests in high fire risk regions, resulting in greater impacts of wildfire on human populations, infrastructure and assets (Williams 2004 ). Deforestation and burning of debris and other types of human activities are also introducing fire in areas where it was historically relatively rare (Tacconi et al. 2007 ).

In a recent study, Chuvieco et al. ( 2014 ) assessed ecosystem vulnerability to fire using an index based on ecological richness and fragility, provision of ecosystem services and value of houses in the wildland–urban interface. The most vulnerable areas were found to be the rainforests of the Amazon Basin, Central Africa and Southeast Asia; the temperate forest of Europe, South America and north-east America; and the ecological corridors of Central America and Southeast Asia.

In general, fire management policies in many parts of the world will need to cope with longer and more severe fire seasons, increasing fire frequency, and larger areas exposed to fire risk. This will especially be the case in the Mediterranean region of Europe (Kolström et al. 2011 ) and other fire-prone parts of the world such as South Eastern Australia (Hennessy et al. 2005 ). This will require improved approaches to fire weather modelling and behaviour prediction that integrate a more sophisticated understanding of the climate system with local knowledge of topography, vegetation and wind patterns. It will also require the development of fire management capacity where it had previously not been necessary. Increased fire weather severity could push current suppression capacity beyond a tipping point, resulting in a substantial increase in large fires (de Groot et al. 2013 ; Liu et al. 2010 ) and increased investment in resources and management efforts for disaster prevention and recovery.

Biotic factors may be more important than direct climate effects on tree populations in a changing climate. For example, insects and diseases have much shorter generation length and are able to adapt to new climatic conditions more rapidly than trees. However, if insects move more rapidly to a new environment whilst tree species lag, some parts of the tree population may be impacted less in the future (Regniere 2009 ).

The interaction of pests, diseases and fire will also be important. For example, this interaction will potentially determine the vulnerability of western white pine ( Pinus monticola ) ecosystems in Montana in the USA. Loehman et al. ( 2011 ) found that warmer temperatures will favour western white pine over existing climax and shade tolerant species, mainly because warmer conditions will lead to increased frequency and extent of wildfires that facilitates regeneration of this species.

3.2 Adaptation actions in forest management

The large majority of published studies relating to forests and climate change have been on vulnerability and impacts. These have increased understanding of the various relationships between forest ecosystems and climate and improved capacity to predict and assess ecosystem responses. However, managers need greater guidance in anticipating and responding to potential impacts of climate change and methods to determine the efficiency and efficacy of different management responses because they are generally not responding sufficiently to potential climate risks.

3.2.1 Adaptation actions at different management levels

A number of recent reviews have described adaptation actions and their potential application in different forest ecosystems being managed for different types of goods or services (Bernier and Schöne 2009 ; Innes et al. 2009 ; Lindner et al. 2010 ; Kolström et al. 2011 ), and adaptation guides and manuals have been developed (Peterson et al. 2011 ; Stephens et al. 2012 ) for different types of forest and jurisdictions. Adaptation actions can be primarily aimed at reducing vulnerability to increasing threats or shocks from natural disasters or extreme events, or increasing resilience and capacity to respond to progressive change or climate extremes. Adaptation actions can be reactive to changing conditions or planned interventions that anticipate future change. They may involve incremental changes to existing management systems or longer term transformational changes (Stafford Smith et al. 2011 ). Adaptation actions can also be applied at the stand level or at ownership, estate or national scales (Keskitalo 2011 ).

Recent research at the stand level in forests in the SE USA showed that forest thinning, often recommended in systems that are likely to experience increased temperature and decreased precipitation as a result of climate change, will need to be more aggressive than traditionally practised to stimulate growth of large residual trees, improve drought resistance and provide greater resilience to future climate-related stress (Kerhoulas et al. 2013 ).

An analysis of three multi-aged stand-level options in Nova Scotia, Canada, Steenberg et al. ( 2011 ) found that leaving sexually immature trees to build stand complexity had the most benefit for timber supply but was least effective in promoting resistance to climate change at the prescribed harvest intensity. Varying the species composition of harvested trees proved the most effective treatment for maximising forest age and old-growth area and for promoting stands composed of climatically suited target species. The combination of all three treatments resulted in an adequate representation of target species and old forest without overly diminishing the timber supply and was considered most effective in minimising the trade-offs between management values and objectives.

An estate level analysis of Austrian Federal Forests indicated that management to promote mixed stands of species that are likely to be well adapted to emerging environmental conditions, silvicultural techniques fostering complexity and increased management intensity might successfully reduce vulnerability, with the timing of adaptation measures important to sustain supply of forest goods and services (Seidl et al. 2011 ).

Whilst researchers are analysing different management options, the extent to which they are being implemented in practice is generally limited. For example, in four regions in Germany, strategies for adapting forest management to climate change are in the early stages of development or simply supplement existing strategies relating to general risk reduction or to introduce more ‘nature-orientated’ forest management (Milad et al. 2013 ). Guariguata et al. ( 2012 ) found that forest managers across the tropics perceived that natural and planted forests are at risk from climate change but were ambivalent about the value of investing in adaptation measures, with climate-related threats to forests ranked below others such as clearing for commercial agriculture and unplanned logging.

Community-based management approaches are often argued to be the most successful approach for adaptation. An analysis of 38 community forestry organisations in British Columbia found that 45 % were researching adaptation and 32 % were integrating adaptation techniques into their work (Furness and Nelson 2012 ). Whilst these community forest managers appreciated support and advice from government for adaptation, balancing this advice with autonomy for communities to make their own decisions was considered challenging.

In a study of communities impacted by drought in the forest zone of Cameroon, Bele et al. ( 2013b ) identified adaptive strategies such as community-created firebreaks to protect their forests and farms from forest fires, the culture of maize and other vegetables in dried swamps, diversifying income activities or changing food regimes. However, these coping strategies were considered to be incommensurate with the rate and magnitude of change being experienced and therefore no longer seen as useful. Some adaptive actions, whilst effective, were resource inefficient and potentially translate pressure from one sector to another or generated other secondary effects that made them undesirable.

3.2.2 Integrating adaptation and mitigation

In considering responses to climate change, forest managers will generally be looking for solutions that address both mitigation objectives and adaptation. To maintain or increase forest carbon stocks over the long term, the two are obviously inextricably linked (Innes et al. 2009 ). Whilst there are potentially strong synergies, Locatelli et al. ( 2011 ) identified potential trade-offs between actions to address mitigation and the provision of local ecosystem services and those for adaptation. They argued that mitigation projects can facilitate or hinder the adaptation of local people to climate change, whereas adaptation projects can affect ecosystems and their potential to sequester carbon.

Broadly, there has been little integration to date of mitigation and adaptation objectives in climate policy. For example, there is little connection between policies supporting the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation plus (REDD+) initiatives and adaptation. Integrating adaptation into REDD+ can advance climate change mitigation goals and objectives for sustainable forest management (Long 2013 ). Kant and Wu ( 2012 ) considered that adaptation actions in tropical forests (protection against fire and disease, ensuring adequate regeneration and protecting against coastal impacts and desertification) will improve future forest resilience and have significant climate change mitigation value.

3.2.3 Sector-level adaptation

Analyses of climate change impacts and vulnerability at the sector level have been undertaken for some time (Lindner et al. 2002 ; Johnston and Williamson 2007 ; Joyce 2007 ). However, it has recently been argued (Wellstead et al. 2014 ) that these assessments, which focus on macro system-level variables and relationships, fail to account for the multi-level or polycentric nature of governance and the possibility that policy processes may result in the non-performance of critical tasks required for adaptation.

Joyce et al. ( 2009 ) considered that a toolbox of management options for the US National Forests would include the following: practices focused on reducing future climate change effects by building resistance and resilience into current ecosystems and on managing for change by enabling plants, animals and ecosystems to adapt to climate change. Sample et al. ( 2014 ) demonstrated the utility of this approach in a coniferous forest management unit in northwestern USA. It provided an effective means for guiding management decisions and an empirical basis for setting budgetary and management priorities. In general, more widespread implementation of already known practices that reduce the impact of existing stressors represents an important ‘no regrets’ strategy.

Johnston and Hesseln ( 2012 ) found that barriers to implementing adaptation across forest sector managers in Canada included inflexible tenure arrangements and regulatory environments which do not support innovation. Echoing calls for wider implementation of SFM as a key adaptation strategy (Innes et al. 2009 ), they argued that forest certification systems, participating in the Canadian model forest programme, and adopting criteria and indicators of SFM can support sectoral level adaptation.

Decentralised management approaches are considered to be a more appropriate governance arrangement for forest management, but Rayner et al. ( 2013 ) argued that a decentralised forest policy sector in Canada has resulted in limitations where policy, such as adaptation, requires a coherent national response. Climate change adaptation has led to an expansion of departmental mandates that is not being addressed by better coordination of the available policy capacity. Relevant federal agencies are not well represented in information networks, and forest policy workers report lower levels of internal and external networking than workers in related policy subsectors.

Economic diversification can be a valuable strategy to improve resilience to climate-related shocks. This can take a range of forms: developing new industries or different types of forest-based industries based on different goods or services. For the timber sector, the value of diversification as a risk management strategy for communities is open to question. Ince et al. ( 2011 ) pointed out that the forest sector operates in an international market and is susceptible to changes in the structure of this market. In the US forest sector, globalization has accelerated structural change, favouring larger and more capital-intensive enterprises and altering historical patterns of resource use. They suggest that future markets for timber will be driven by developments in these larger scale enterprises and may not lead to expansion of opportunities for smaller scale forest enterprises because development of niche markets or customised products is likely to be pursued aggressively by larger globally oriented enterprises to develop branding, product identity and product value. How to best diversify for adaptation therefore remains an open question.

Consequently, whilst policies that support economic diversification will be important, this may involve diversification well beyond traditional sectors. For example, in areas where there is a high probability that forests will be lost in favour of other ecosystems, such as grasslands, managers should recognise early on that their efforts and resources may best be focused outside forests (Innes et al. 2009 ). These adjustments will involve taking into account the perceptions of climate risk by various stakeholders, including individuals, communities, governments, private institutions and organisations (Adger et al. 2007 ). Vulnerability assessments and adaptation measures also need to be developed in a framework that takes into account the vulnerabilities and actions in other sectors that are linked to the forest sector, such as food, energy, health and water (Sonwa et al. 2012 ).

3.3 New approaches to decision making

Climate change presents new challenges for forest managers. Change is likely to happen faster than traditional, empirical approaches can provide evidence to support changes in management. Uncertainties in a range of aspects of future climate may also not be reduced through investment in research. Given that management for activities such as timber production can no longer be based solely on empirically derived growth and yield trajectories and management plans must incorporate uncertainty and the increased probability of extreme events, what types of tools are available to support these approaches? This section presents key points from the literature on decision making under uncertainty, adaptive management and resilience as a guide to future decision making in forest management.

3.3.1 Decision making under uncertainty

The future conditions for forest managers are subject to a high degree of uncertainty, and the future prospects for reducing these large uncertainties are limited. There is uncertainty regarding the trajectory of future increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, what kind of effects these might have on the climate system and the effects of climatic changes on ecological and social systems and their capacity to adapt (see Fig.  2 ) (Wilby and Dessai 2010 ).

The cascade of uncertainty (Wilby and Dessai 2010 )

Consequently, many forest managers consider that the future situation is too uncertain to support long-term and potentially costly decisions that may be difficult to reverse. Dessai and Hulme ( 2004 ) argued that uncertainty per se should not be a reason for inaction. However, the critical issue for managers is deciding the types of actions to take and the timing and conditions under which they should be taken (Ogden and Innes 2007a ). A more reactive ‘wait and see’ approach (or ‘purposeful procrastination’) might be justified if uncertainty or costs are high relative to the expected impacts and risks, or if it is cheaper to implement interventions by waiting until after a significant disturbance (e.g. replanting an area with more fire- or drought-resistant tree species after a wildfire or drought-induced insect outbreak).

Effective adaptation requires setting clear objectives. Managers and policy makers need to decide whether they are trying to facilitate ecosystem adaptation through changing species composition or forest structure or trying to engineer resistance to change through proactive management strategies (Joyce et al. 2008 ). Establishing objectives often depends on the integration of the preferences of different stakeholders (Prato 2008 ), but changing social preferences presents another source of potential uncertainty.

Risk assessment and management provide a foundation for decision making in considering climate change in natural resource management. This approach provides both a qualitative and quantitative framework for evaluating climate change effects and adaptation options. Incorporating risk management approaches into forest management plans can provide a basis for managers to continue to provide forest conditions that meet a range of important values (Day and Perez 2013 ).

However, risk approaches generally requiring assigning probabilities to future events. In a comprehensive review, Yousefpour et al. ( 2011 ) identified a growing body of research literature on decision making under uncertainty, much of which has focused on price uncertainty and variation in timber production but is extending to multiple forest management objectives and other types of risk. They argue that we are actually in a stochastic transition from one known stable (but variable) climate state to a new but largely unknown and likely more rapidly changing set of future conditions.

Decision makers themselves may also not be the rational actors assumed by these models, with their decisions taken according to quite different assumptions, preferences and beliefs (Ananda and Herath 2009 ; Couture and Reynaud 2008 ). Therefore, the communication approach will be important in determining whether the information is acted on. In a recent study, Yousefpour et al. ( 2014 ) considered that the speed with which decision makers will form firm beliefs about future climate depends on the divergence among climate trajectories, the speed of change and short-term climate variability. Using a Bayesian modelling approach, they found that if a large change in climate occurs, the value of investing in knowledge and taking an adaptive approach would be positive and higher than a non-adaptive approach. In communicating about uncertainty, it may be better to focus discussion on the varying time in the future when things will happen, rather than on whether they will happen at all (Lindner et al. 2014 ).

Increased investment in climate science and projections or species distribution modelling may not necessarily decrease uncertainty in climate projections or impacts. Climate models are best viewed as heuristic tools rather than as accurate forecasts of the future (Innes et al. 2009 ). Trajectories of change in many other drivers of forest management (social, political or economic) are also highly uncertain (Keskitalo 2008 ) and the effects of these on the projected performance of management can be the same order of magnitude, requiring an integrated social-ecological perspective to adaptation (Seidl and Lexer 2013 ).

In a more ‘decision-centred’ approach, plausible scenarios of the potential range of future conditions are required. These can be derived from climate models but do not need to be accurate and precise ‘predictions’ of future climate states (Wilby and Dessai 2010 ). To support this type of approach, research needs to focus on improved understanding of tree and ecosystem responses and identifying those aspects of climate to which different forest types are most sensitive.

Devising strategies that are able to meet management objectives under a range of future scenarios is likely to be the most robust approach, recognising that these strategies are unlikely to be optimal under all future conditions. In some cases, the effect of different scenarios on forest growth may not be that great and differences in the present value of different management options are relatively small. For example, Eriksson et al. ( 2011 ) found that there was limited benefit in attempting to optimise management plans in accordance with future temperature scenarios.

Integration of climate change science and adaptation in forest management planning is considered important for building resilience in forest social and ecological systems (Keskitalo 2011 ; D’Amato et al. 2011 ; Chmura et al. 2011 ; Parks and Bernier 2010 ; Lindner et al. 2014 ). Forest restoration is becoming a more prominent aspect of forest management in many parts of the world and restoration approaches will also need to integrate understanding of future climate change to be successful (Stanturf et al. 2014 ).

3.3.2 Adaptive management, resilience and decisions

Adaptive management provides a mechanism to move forward when faced with future uncertainty (Innes et al. 2009 ). It can be viewed as a systematic process for continually improving management policies and practices by monitoring and then learning from the outcomes of operational programmes as a basis for incorporating adaptation actions into forest management. Whilst many management initiatives purport to implement these principles, they often lack essential characteristics of the approach (Innes et al. 2009 ).

However, effective adaptation to changing climate cannot simply involve adaptive management as it is currently understood. The pace of climate change is not likely to allow for the use of management as a tool to learn about the system by implementing methodologies to test hypotheses concerning known uncertainties (Holling 1978 ). Future climatic conditions may result in system states and dynamics that have never previously existed (Stainforth et al. 2007 ), so observation of past experience may be a poor guide for future action. Management will need to be more ‘forward-looking’, considering the range of possible future conditions and planning actions that consider that full range.

How does this translate into the practical guidance forest managers are seeking on how to adapt their current practices and, if necessary, their goals (Blate et al. 2009 )? Managers will need to consider trade-offs between different objectives under different conditions. For example, Seidl et al. ( 2011 ) showed that, to keep climate vulnerability in an Austrian forest low, Norway spruce will have to be replaced almost entirely by better adapted species. However, indicator weights that favoured timber production over C storage or biodiversity exerted a strong influence on the results. Wider social implications of imposing such drastic changes in forest landscapes will also deserve stronger consideration in decision making.

Ecosystem management will need to be reframed to accommodate the risks of a changing climate. Adaptive strategies, even without specific information on the future climate conditions of a target ecosystem, would enhance social and ecological resilience to address the uncertainties due to changing climate (Mori et al. 2013 ). These are likely to be more subject to change over the short to medium term, in response to more rapidly changing conditions.

Analysis of ecosystem resilience can provide a framework for these assessments. Resilience can be defined as ‘the capacity of ecosystems to absorb disturbance and reorganise so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks – to have the same identity’ (Walker and Salt 2012 ). It is a function of the capacity of an ecosystem to resist change, the extent and pace of change and the ability of an ecosystem to reorganise following disturbance. The concept of resilience holds promise for informing future forest management, but Rist and Moen ( 2013 ) argue that its contributions are, so far, largely conceptual and offer more in terms of being a problem-framing approach than analytical or practical tools. There may also be trade-offs involved with focusing on resilience through retention of current species composition or using a more adaptation-oriented management approach after disturbances (Buma and Wessman 2013 ). Complexity theory and concepts can provide an appropriate framework for managing resilience (Messier et al. 2013 ).

Management decisions will ultimately depend on the costs and benefits of different options, but there are few examples of decision making frameworks that compare the costs of future impacts with the costs of different actions and the efficacy of those actions in reducing impacts. Ogden and Innes ( 2009 ) used a structured decision making process to identify and assess 24 adaptation options that managers considered important to achieve their regional goals and objectives of sustainable forest management in light of climate change. In the analysis of options for biodiversity conservation, Wintle et al. ( 2011 ) found that the amount of funding available for adaptation was a critical factor in deciding options aimed at minimising species extinctions in the mega-diverse fynbos biome of South Africa. When the available budget is small, fire management was the best strategy. If the budget is increased to an intermediate level, the marginal returns from more fire management were limited and the best strategy was added habitat protection. Above another budget threshold, increased investment should go into more fire management. By integrating ecological predictions in an economic decision framework, they found that making the choice of how much to invest is as important as determining what actions to take.

3.3.3 Adaptation as a social learning process

Whilst adaptation has been defined as ‘adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects’ (Levina and Tirpak 2006 ), adaptation is essentially about meeting future human needs (Spittlehouse and Stewart 2003 ; Hahn and Knoke 2010 ). Consequently, it is inherently a social process. Forest landscapes are social-ecological systems that involve both nature and society (Innes et al. 2009 ), and resolving trade-offs between different management objectives to meet the different needs in society is an important element of sustainable forest management. As Kolström et al. ( 2011 ) pointed out, some proposed adaptation measures may change the balance between current objectives and stakeholder interests, and it will be important to consider the relative balance of different measures at the stand, management unit and landscape scales.

Those investigating adaptive management also recognise that it goes beyond the focus on scientific methods, statistical designs or analytical rigour favoured by its early proponents and that there is now an expectation of much greater stakeholder involvement, with the concept being renamed by some as adaptive, collaborative management (Innes et al. 2009 ). SFM and adaptation are as much about those who inhabit, work in or utilise forests as it is about managing the forest ecosystems themselves (White et al. 2010 ; Pramova et al. 2012 ; Fischer et al. 2013 ).

The choice of adaptation options will thus likely be relatively complex, even in cases where information and policy have been developed, and communication measures for forest management have been well formulated. Making such choices may require considerable knowledge, competence and commitment for implementation at the local level (Keskitalo 2011 ). Effective adaptation will require much greater cooperation between stakeholders, more flexibility for management actions and commitment of time to develop the social license for action in the absence of conclusive evidence or understanding. This will require venues for sharing perspectives on the nature of the problem (Fig.  3 ).

Adaptation as a social learning process. There is a need to provide situations to share different viewpoints on the nature of the problem as a basis for developing shared solutions (image source: John Rowley, http://ch301.cm.utexas.edu/learn/ )

3.3.4 Local and indigenous knowledge

The promotion of community-based forest management may increase local adaptive capacity by putting decisions in the hands of those people who first feel the effects of climate change (Gyampoh et al. 2009 ). In this context, local knowledge systems based on long-term observation and experience are likely to be of increasing importance in decision making. Adaptation strategies can benefit from combining scientific and indigenous knowledge, especially in developing countries (Gyampoh et al. 2009 ), with the translation of local forest knowledge into the language of formal forest science being considered an important step towards adaptation (Roberts et al. 2009 ). However, conservation and natural resource managers in government agencies have often discounted traditional local management systems (Scott 2005 ), although Spathelf et al. ( 2014 ) provided a useful approach for capturing local expert knowledge. Linking this type of knowledge with broader scientific understanding of ecosystem functioning and the global climate system will be a major challenge, requiring consideration of both technical and cultural issues (Caverley 2013 ), including intellectual property concerns of indigenous people (Lynch et al. 2010 ).

3.4 Policy arrangements for adaptation

Increasingly, many are arguing that effectively responding to climate change will require polycentric and multi-level governance arrangements (Peel et al. 2012 ). However, Nilsson et al. ( 2012 ) found that institutionalising of knowledge and knowledge exchange regarding climate change adaptation in Sweden was weak and that improved mechanisms are required for feedback from the local to the national level. Recent studies have described stronger relationships between scientific research and forest management to assess trade-offs and synergies, for participatory decision making and for shared learning (Blate et al. 2009 ; Littell et al. 2012 ; Klenk et al. 2011 ).

Many papers emphasised the need for greater flexibility in the policies, cultures and structures of forest management organisations (Brown 2009 ; von Detten and Faber 2013 ; Rayner et al. 2013 ). Because no single community or agency can prepare on their own for future impacts, inter-sectoral policy coordination will be required to ensure that policy developments in related policy sectors are not contradictory or counterproductive. Greater integration of information, knowledge and experience and collaborative projects involving scientists, practitioners and policy makers from multiple policy communities could increase focus on resilience, identify regions of large-scale vulnerability and provide a more rigorous framework for the analysis of vulnerability and adaptation actions (Thomalla et al. 2006 ).

There is also likely to be a greater need for cross-border implementation of different forest management options, requiring greater coordination between nation states and sub-national governments (Keenan 2012 ). Policy is the product of both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ processes and these might sometimes be in conflict. Simply having ‘good policy’ in place is unlikely to be sufficient, as a great deal of what takes place at ‘street level’ is not determined by formal aims of central policy (Urwin and Jordan 2008 ). Having the right policies can send a strong political signal that adaptation needs to be considered seriously but flexibility in policy systems will be required to facilitate adaptive planning.

4 Discussion and conclusions

This broad survey of the literature indicated that, whilst there has been considerable development in research and thinking about adaptation in forest management over the last 10 years, research is still strongly focused on assessment of future impacts, responses and vulnerability of species and ecosystems (and in some cases communities and forest industries) to climate change. There has been some movement from a static view of climate based on long-term averages to a more detailed understanding of the drivers of different climate systems and how these affect the factors of greatest influence on different forest ecosystems processes, such as variability and extremes in temperature or precipitation or fire disturbance. For example, Guan et al. ( 2012 ) demonstrated that quasi-periodic climate variation on an inter-annual (ENSO) to inter-decadal (PDO) time scale can significantly influence tree growth and should be taken into account when assessing the impact of climate changes on forest productivity.

Adaptation is, in essence, about making good decisions for the future, taking into account the implications of climate change. It involves recognising and understanding potential future climate impacts and planning and managing for their consequences, whilst also considering the broader social, economic or other environmental changes that may impact on us, individually or collectively. To effectively provide a role in mitigation, delivering associated ecosystem services and benefits in poverty reduction (Eliasch 2008 ) forest management will have to adapt to a changing and highly variable climate. In achieving this, the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government, the private sector and different parts of the community are still being defined.

The broader literature emphasises that adaptation is a continuous process, involving a process of ‘adapting well’ to continuously changing conditions (Tompkins et al. 2010 ). This requires organisational learning based on past experience, new knowledge and a comprehensive analysis of future options. This can take place through ‘learning by doing’ or through a process of search and planned modification of routines (Berkhout et al. 2006 ). However, interpreting climate signals is not easy for organisations, the evidence of change is ambiguous and the stimuli are not often experienced directly within the organisation. For example, many forest managers in Australia currently feel little need to change practices to adapt to climate change, given both weak policy signals and limited perceived immediate evidence of increasing climate impacts (Cockfield et al. 2011 ). To explain and predict adaptation to climate change, the combination of personal experience and beliefs must be considered (Blennow et al. 2012 ). ‘Climate smart’ forest management frameworks can provide an improved basis for managing forested landscapes and maintaining ecosystem health and vitality based on an understanding of landscape vulnerability to future climatic change (Fig. 4 ) (Nitschke and Innes 2008a ).

Components of climate smart forest management (after Nitschke and Innes 2008a , b )

Many are now asking, do we really need more research to start adapting forest management to climate change? Whilst adaptation is often considered ‘knowledge deficit’ problem—where scientists provide more information and forest managers will automatically make better decisions—the reality is that the way in which this information is presented and how it is interpreted and received, will play major roles in determining potential responses. Successful adaptation will require dissemination of knowledge of potential climate impacts and suitable adaptation measures to decision makers at both practice and policy levels (Kolström et al. 2011 ) but it needs to go well beyond that.

Adaptation is, above all, a social learning process. It requires an understanding of sense of place, a capacity for individuals and society to consider potential future changes and what they mean for their circumstances. Leaders in forest management organisations will need to support a greater diversity of inputs into decision making, avoid creating rigid organisational hierarchies that deter innovation, and be inclusive, open and questioning (Konkin and Hopkins 2009 ). They will need to create more opportunities for interaction between researchers, managers and the community and space for reflection on the implications and the outcomes of management actions and unplanned events. Researchers will need to develop new modes of communication, providing knowledge in forms that are appropriate to the management decision and suitable for digestion by a range of different audiences.

From this analysis, key gaps in knowledge for adaptation may not be improved climate scenarios or better understanding of the biophysical responses of individual tree species or forest ecosystems to future climate. Knowledge gaps lie more in understanding the social and community attitudes and values that drive forest management and the decision making processes of forest managers, in order to work out how ‘climate intelligence’ can be built in to these processes.

The impacts of changing climate will vary locally. Consequently, managers must be given the flexibility to respond in ways that meet their particular needs and capacity to choose management options that are applicable to the local situation (Innes et al. 2009 ). This may not be consistent with rigid indicator-driven management assessment processes like forest certification. Whilst policy to support climate change mitigation is primarily a task for national governments and international agreements and processes, responsibility for supporting adaptation will fall more to sub-national and local governments, communities and the private sector. More active management will be required if specific values are to be maintained, particularly for forests in conservation reserves. This will require additional investment, but there has been little analysis to support the business case for investment in adaptation or to determine who should pay, particularly in developing countries.

We need to strengthen the relationship between climate science, forest research, forest managers and the community. Key challenges will include the setting of objectives for desired future conditions and accepting that we may not be able to maintain everything that forests have traditionally provided. It is important to discuss and agree on common goals in order to cope with, or benefit from, the challenges of future climates. Actively managing our forest ecosystems effectively and intelligently, using the best available knowledge and foresight capacity, can make those goals a reality.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Linda Joyce for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper, to a number of anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions and to many colleagues that I have discussed these ideas with over the past five years.

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This research was partly undertaken during the period the author was Director of the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research and part-funded by the Victorian Government. It was completed with support from the University of Melbourne under a Special Studies Program grant.

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Keenan, R.J. Climate change impacts and adaptation in forest management: a review. Annals of Forest Science 72 , 145–167 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13595-014-0446-5

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Purpose of Review

Forest models are becoming essential tools in forest research, management, and policymaking but currently are under deep transformation. In this review of the most recent literature (2018–2022), we aim to provide an updated general view of the main topics currently attracting the efforts of forest modelers, the trends already in place, and some of the current and future challenges that the field will face.

Recent Findings

Four major topics attracting most of on current modelling efforts: data acquisition, productivity estimation, ecological pattern predictions, and forest management related to ecosystem services. Although the topics may seem different, they all are converging towards integrated modelling approaches by the pressure of climate change as the major coalescent force, pushing current research efforts into integrated mechanistic, cross-scale simulations of forest functioning and structure.

We conclude that forest modelling is experiencing an exciting but challenging time, due to the combination of new methods to easily acquire massive amounts of data, new techniques to statistically process such data, and refinements in mechanistic modelling that are incorporating higher levels of ecological complexity and breaking traditional barriers in spatial and temporal scales. However, new available data and techniques are also creating new challenges. In any case, forest modelling is increasingly acknowledged as a community and interdisciplinary effort. As such, ways to deliver simplified versions or easy entry points to models should be encouraged to integrate non-modelers stakeholders into the modelling process since its inception. This should be considered particularly as academic forest modelers may be increasing the ecological and mathematical complexity of forest models.

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Introduction

Forests are one of the most complex ecosystems on Earth’s biosphere, as they host a large proportion of terrestrial biodiversity and exist at the interface between the atmosphere and the pedosphere. In addition, forests are defined as such because the dominant organisms are trees, which are long-lived immobile individuals that are usually large [ 1 ]. These features provide opportunity for forests to develop specific spatial and temporal structures that have direct influence on how the ecosystem functions (i.e., nutrient, water and energy cycles, gene flows, population, and successional changes).

All this natural complexity poses a true challenge for representing forest structure and functioning in scientific and technical studies, as well as for science-based management [ 2 ]. Traditionally, forest models have focused on the dominant organisms (trees) and how they grow, survive, and are distributed [ 3 ••]. This approach has been dominant since the beginning of early quantitative forestry in the eighteenth century. However, for the last few decades, it has been well known that understanding how trees function is not enough to understand how forests function, as other forest components (understory, wildlife, soil, and microbial communities) are also influencing trees. Hence, forest models have constantly evolved to incorporate some of forests’ complexity into their algorithms in order to produce the estimations that model developers consider necessary to meet their objectives.

The development of the first forest growth simulator marked the beginning of a new approach to estimate tree growth. Since then, modelling has evolved from the data-based approach of using statistical tools to transform observed data (“empirical models”) into an approach in which an understanding of causal relationships between variables was added to statistical relationships in order to predict variables of interest (“process-based models”) [ 4 ]. Soon after, the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches were identified [ 5 , 6 ], and with the aim of solving them, an intermediary approach was proposed [ 7 ]. Since then, forest models have evolved considerably, and in the last few years, important technical developments have revolutionized the forest modelling field [ 8 ], such as the following: the continuous increment of computing power [ 9 ]; the development of new statistical methods [ 10 ]; the great expansion in techniques for data acquisition such as LiDAR, spectral, hyperspectral, thermal, or radar sensors that can be applied at broad scales [ 11 ]; or the development of autonomous continuous measurement devices for soil, vegetation, and atmospheric variables [ 12 ]. Therefore, the aim of this review is to identify the current focuses in forest modelling that are capturing most of the research effort.

Current Main Topics in Forest Modelling

To identify the current trends in forest modelling, we first carried out a search in the Web of Science database ( https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/advanced-search ) for the years 2018 to 2022 using the terms “forest modelling,” “forest function,” “forest distribution,” “forest adaptation,” and “modelling forest function” (with their alternative spellings) in the title and keywords of documents. We identified a total of 4933 documents. Among those, we selected 154 papers that were reviews of different modelling topics. After screening for relevance, the selected review papers used for our narrative review were reduced to 79.

On a second phase, to objectively identify the most popular topics in the most recent literature, we used the visualization tool VOSviewer [ 13 ] with the database of 4933 documents to map the relationships between their keywords. However, as the statistical term “random forests” was distorting the database (data not shown), we removed the documents with this term. As a result, we retained 2040 documents for keyword mapping with VOSviewer v1.6.18 (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands, http://www.vosviewer.com ). We limited the minimum number of occurrences for each keyword displayed in the map to 30 (Fig.  1 ). As a result, 20 different keywords were selected. This search was not intended to be a formal or in-depth quantitative review but merely a way to gain an unbiased and up-to-date insight on current popular modelling trends.

Keyword map showing relationships between the 20 most common keywords in documents related to forest modelling published in the Web of Science in the 2018–2022 period. Different line and dot colors indicate different clusters of terms. Dot size is proportional to the frequency of each keyword, and line thickness is proportional to the frequency of co-occurrence of connected keywords

As main result of the keyword mapping, we found the term “climate change” as the most cited. Climate change also stood out in a central position among all other terms. In addition, four different clusters of terms were identified, with climate change being the main connector among them. The first cluster (in red in Fig.  1 ) could be considered as built around quantitative assessments of vegetation biomass (or carbon) using remote-sensing techniques (either aerial or terrestrial). The second cluster (in yellow in Fig.  1 ) was composed of the relationships between growth, productivity, and climate. The third cluster (in blue in Fig.  1 ) was limited to more technical terms related to model building. Finally, the fourth cluster (in green in Fig.  1 ) was related to ecosystem services and management, in combination with climate change. Below, we discuss the main trends in each of these clusters in the following sections, based on the 79 review papers identified as relevant.

Climate Change: the Main Driver for Forest Modeling

It is not surprising that climate change is at the center of current forest modelling efforts, a pattern already noticed in other recent reviews [ 14 ]. This result could just reflect the generalized wish by forest researchers to link their work to the current widespread scientific polices focused on addressing climate change, but it could also genuinely indicate the need for understanding how complex systems such as forests will behave under unknown climate conditions. Climate change is being observed as a major force behind many changes in current and future forest environmental changes [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. Such changes will affect in different ways the key factors driving tree physiology, and therefore, new modelling approaches need to disaggregate climate influences on those drivers. Hence, understanding detailed effects of climate change, alone or in combination with other major drivers for change such as land-use change or biodiversity loss, is obviously the ultimate goal of much of the current modelling effort.

The realization of the first signs of climate change and the need for early action in forest management well in advance of other economic sectors (due to the long-lived nature of trees) has meant that for at least two decades, the need to provide forest models with capabilities to simulate climate change has been recognized [ 19 , 20 ]. Such need has meant that the use of simple correlational models using traditional data from permanent plots or inventories has long been seen as inadequate among the scientific community for climate change-related studies, although such an approach can be very suitable for other research and management applications [ 21 ]. In addition, other models that had implicit representation of climate influences have moved into explicit representations to keep up with the knowledge demands on climate change effects on forest systems from different stakeholders [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ].

Nevertheless, for the successful implementation of climate change simulation capabilities into forest models, modelers need to move beyond direct effects on temperature and precipitation. For example, a scarce availability of models able to link climate change with ecological disturbances has been identified [ 26 ]. Similarly, most regeneration algorithms used in forest models do not capture the effect of climate change [ 27 ]. In any case, climate change needs to be directly linked to modelling physiological responses (e.g., phenology, photosynthesis, respiration) and to frequency and severity of disturbances (fire, drought, insects’ outbreaks, etc.). In turn, changes in these processes will also affect other ecosystem processes (allocation, allometry, growth at tree level, biodiversity, and competition at ecosystem level), and therefore, simulating climate change effects will indirectly be needed to improve how such processes are modelled.

Remote Sensing and Biomass Accounting

Biomass (in the form of timber, firewood, cork, fruit, resin, charcoal, etc.) has traditionally been the most important commodity obtained from forests. Therefore, it is not surprising that the different ways to estimate forest biomass and other closely related variables (i.e., timber volume, carbon) are still among the most important topics in current forest modelling efforts (Fig.  1 ). Among them, modelling strategies to sequester C stands out as one of the most important topics [ 28 ]. The large size and immobile nature of trees allow individual features such as diameter and height to be measured at different times over extended periods. Such an inventory-based approach can provide a wealth of data, but it quickly becomes a cumbersome task when large and diverse forest areas need to be assessed. However, the explosive development of remote-sensing techniques, the lowering prices of unmanned aerial vehicles, and the continuous growth in computing capabilities are generating the ability to finally obtain detailed assessment of not only the basic population features but also the structure and spatial distribution of individual trees over large areas [ 29 ••].

A model convergence towards the tree scale for meaningful C-cycle modelling, both from upscaling more physiologically oriented models and downscaling stand-level C accounting models, has been noted [ 30 •]. However, not until very recently have researchers looked for ways to incorporate structural diversity into process-based models. A detailed review on the potential and limitations of using terrestrial laser scanning to calibrate functional-structural plant models is available [ 31 •]. One of the main advantages of linking both modelling approaches is the potential to include physiological models into a realistic structure of plant communities. This could move structural modelling from individual to community level. In fact, there are suggestions that the merging of allometry, empirical observation, remote sensing, and individual-based modelling will contribute to a more unified vision of forest ecology [ 32 ]. However, to reach such a level of integration, proper processing of terrestrial laser scanning data is needed. In addition, researchers should avoid the temptation of upscaling functional-structural plant models to the landscape level, as it will be challenging due to the potential to misrepresent other ecological processes more relevant at such a spatial scale [ 33 , 34 ].

Another important challenge to incorporate more remote sensing into forest models is the need for increased measures of standardization and uncertainty in observations [ 35 ]. However, these authors also highlight the high potential of remote-sensing data to automatize carbon models, which currently need manual and time-consuming calibration. In this respect, several issues have been identified when increasing the importance of remote data acquisition of canopy structure, such as the need for standardization of modeling approaches, the need for open datasets, the need to improve allometric models, and the need for stronger validation protocols [ 29 ••].

Allometric models are as important as remote sensing to estimate timber volume, biomass, or carbon stocks. Such models have been extensively used in the past but usually using data from pure and coetaneous stands [ 14 , 35 ]. This situation introduces an important bias when estimating carbon or biomass stocks in natural forests, which are usually multispecies and multiaged, as species allometry changes in the presence of competitors [ 36 ]. Hence, using allometric equations from pure stands could be a source of uncertainty when modelling mixed stands, as there are significant differences in allometry for a given species when growing in a single- vs. multiple-species stand [ 37 ]. In addition, many of these allometric models do not include climatic or stand-level features [ 14 ], although recent research has been undertaken to address these shortcomings [ 25 , 36 ].

The combination of different remote-sensing techniques such as LiDAR and radar can help to accurately model forest structure [ 29 ••]. An additional feature of models based on remote sensing is the potential to simulate and estimate radiation levels through the canopy and on the understory based on 3D data from LiDAR measurements. For example, the division of the canopy into volumetric pixels (or “voxels”) allows for simulating the interaction between trees, understory, and radiation at individual-tree levels or even smaller scales. In fact, 3D canopy simulation can be a more reliable way to estimate energy and C fluxes than traditional inventory-based approaches [ 38 ]. In addition, such models could help in improving connections between forest and atmosphere models [ 39 ].

Additional issues when simulating C fluxes, particularly C allocation, have been identified [ 40 •]. These authors have highlighted that the common use of fixed ratios for allocating C to plant organs is a severe oversimplification under climate change, as it removes from the model the sensitivity to environmental conditions and disturbances. In addition, the usual time steps in forest models (seasonal or annual) are too large to capture C allocation dynamics and resource acquisition. In summary, the generalized use of allometry and inventory-based approaches is just not adequate to capture short-term C dynamics [ 40 •].

Patterns vs. Processes

A second main topic in current forest modelling research is the development of new and refined methodological approaches, mostly through the use of advanced mathematical or statistical tools or by borrowing them from other fields. New progress is made almost daily in deep learning methods than are revolutionizing modern ecology [ 41 ]. These methods have great potential to improve computationally costly tasks such as classification of information from remote sensing or simulation of interactions between individuals in large forest areas. The use of these advanced statistical techniques is greatly expanding modelling capabilities to link research done at multiple scales, to simulate larger regions, and to incorporate dynamic changes at shorter temporal scales (crucial for accurate C flux modelling).

The need for such increasingly powerful approaches is clear by the two keywords highlighted in our review for this cluster (“prediction” and “pattern,” Fig.  1 ). There is a dire need for tools that can provide usable predictions for managers, as the forestry sector needs to adapt to climate change even earlier than other sectors, given the long-term consequences of current management decisions [ 42 ]. Hence, using techniques to simplify model use will undoubtedly facilitate the generation of tools easy to interpret and to share with non-modelers, and that can be easily compared with expert knowledge [ 43 ]. This idea of simplification while retaining the behavior of complex process-based models is behind the developments of “model emulators” [ 44 ].

Model emulators are built to mimic the same outputs from complex (usually process-based) models, with the main objectives of reducing computing requirements. This simplification allows for integration of the emulator in other modelling platforms (and therefore connectivity with other models or submodules different from the original process-based model), to expand temporal and spatial scales not reachable with the original process-based models or to simplify interaction with model users. Such expansion of the basic model could be crucial to understand ecological patterns that emerge at higher scales and that otherwise would not have been directly inferred by the underlying process-based model [ 45 ]. Hence, emulators could be valuable tools in the future to understand ecological patterns at large scales, particularly under novel ecological conditions created by the combination of climate, biodiversity, and land-use changes.

However, the development of emulators also brings an important challenge to the field of ecological modelling. The substitution of process-based algorithms by machine-learning based decision rules offers clear advantages. Nonetheless, it could also be considered as a process to create “black box” models in which scientific understanding of ecological process is impeded, as the mechanisms behind such processes are simplified to just algorithms that have the same outcomes. A detailed review on model simplification is available [ 46 ].

Obviously, this situation highlights the need for a dual direction in scientific advancement: while emulators are clearly useful tools to study ecological patterns, ecological processes can be better studied with mechanistic process-based models (although such a division is not so clear [ 44 ]). Advancement along both lines will also support the development of “digital twins”: computer-based copies of real forests constructed to mimic the most intricate patterns and processes, with visualization of virtual stands as one of their main strengths. These digital tools are already being proposed to train managers and researchers in understanding how climate change and new management techniques could facilitate the transition of the forest sector towards novel conditions [ 47 ]. Obviously, digital twins depend not only on the simulation and visualization techniques used but also on particularly the availability of quality data to calibrate them. Here again, remote sensing, forest inventories, and traditional fieldwork data will be crucial, as the old-fashioned rule in ecological modelling is still valid: in the absence of adequate data, all different modelling options are equally valid [ 43 ].

Productivity Still a Concern

A third popular topic in current forest modelling is related to forest productivity and growth (Fig.  1 ). This indicates that, even if for more than two decades efforts have been made to add non-timber forest products to forest models (i.e., [ 48 ]), estimating forest productivity is still a major issue in the field. This research cluster is clearly focused on how tree growth is influenced by climate. One of the key features of the research on this topic are the continuous calls for development of new growth models for species and regions outside North America, Europe, and to a lesser extent Asia [ 49 , 50 ••]. An example of successful model application around the world is the spread in the use of 3-PG, which was originally developed for Australian eucalyptus plantations but has been embraced and modified for its application in multiple regions and stand types [ 51 ]. The widespread application of 3-PG by scientists and managers was recognized in 2020 by the Marcus Wallenberg Prize which was awarded to their developers ( https://mwp.org/link-to-mwp-digital-ceremony-and-symposium/ ).

Productivity estimations will remain crucial in the near and medium future, as commercial forestry will likely become more focused on high-yield intensively managed plantations to sequester and substitute carbon-intensive materials. Conservation forestry will increasingly expand into forest reserves around the world to increase stored carbon and protect biodiversity. In this context, the development of basic (but management-friendly) correlational models such as allometric and inventory-based models is needed [ 35 , 52 , 53 ]. However, the need to include climate in all these new models is certainly a challenge for new regions and species, as they would need either long-term data series or an extensive network of inventory plots to account for climatic influences on tree growth rates or allometry. Hence, new developments in automatic and climate-sensitive tree monitoring devices may be helpful [ 12 ].

Modelling Forests Beyond Trees

While tree growth and productivity are still an important topic, the largest cluster of research topics identified was related to modelling forest components other than trees. Most of this research is based on the clear understanding that for models to be able to handle climate change effects, it is essential to include more ecosystem components that historically have received less attention [ 21 ].

Some key issues are the improved assessment of carbon and water cycles. For example, it has been stated that those models using drought indexes that include an evaporative component work better, but also that there is just a small number of studies actually evaluating drought indexes against physiological indicators of water stress [ 54 ]. In this respect, a recent review of the way in which the representation of evapotranspiration processes has evolved in forest models has noticed a trend towards the simplification from the initial attempts, achieved by the availability of more empirical data and model evaluation tests that have allowed the refinement of simulation algorithms [ 55 ]. These authors have pointed that such simplification allows for further connections to water flow models and the scalability of such research. This is an important advance, as the common oversimplification of eco-hydrological processes in models makes linkages with socio-economic values more difficult to evaluate [ 56 •]. These authors also pointed to a lack of empirical work on effects of water availability in forest productivity. Further developments that mechanistically link hydraulic conductance with physiology, growth and mortality are taking place [ 57 , 58 , 59 ].

How biodiversity is integrated into forest models is another of the issues in this keyword cluster. Traditionally, there is a biodiversity bias towards trees in forest models [ 60 ]. This is not surprising, as biodiversity interactions (both animal and vegetal) in forests are a complex and broad field that have not been incorporated into models until relatively recently, and that still remains largely ignored in operational models used in forest management. In this regard, a lack of integration of modelling approaches at different spatiotemporal scales has been identified as a barrier to implement biodiversity into forest modelling [ 61 ]. Similarly, calls for more attention to the role of understory in key ecological processes have been raised [ 62 ], even if early examples of the importance of tree-understory interactions when simulating commercial forestry are available [e.g., 63]. It is currently advocated that the most efficient approach is to use plant functional traits that can accommodate the inherent complexity of understory communities. To do so, models must have detailed time and spatial scale to allow for the different ecophysiological behaviors (many times resource opportunistic) that understory species usually display, particularly following disturbances [ 64 ].

An important effort currently taking place in vegetation science is determining how functional traits can be applied to models to understand how species with different traits interact. An important and ongoing development is to expand the functional trait approach being developed for vegetation studies [ 65 ]. This is particularly important in highly diverse ecosystems such as tropical forests in which it is unrealistic to simulate forest dynamics with only a few dominant species.The functional trait approach is now being expanded to model species interactions including animals, particularly herbivores. However, mechanistic models of forest pests are usually based on correlations between environmental variables (e.g., degree days) and growth rates (usually at individual or population scales), and limited to some of the pest’s life cycle stages. Hence, there is a need for models able to integrate current algorithms that simulate specific pest and pathogens at different development stages to obtain meaningful estimates of their interactions with the rest of forest components [ 43 ]. More intriguingly, concerns have been raised around the usually forgotten role of megafauna in forest models [ 3 ••]. Although it has been traditionally assumed that the effects of megafauna are realized at the forest level through seed dispersal, arguments exist to also consider their impacts on nutrient cycling and plant demography, such as the role of megafauna on predation of plant reproductive organs, mortality caused by herbivory or trampling, and nutrient redistribution related to animal residues [ 3 ••]. A serious effort to better understand the role of megafauna in forests is needed, given the current situation of defaunation in many areas of the world, which in some areas is trying to be reversed by rewilding actions. The use of “herbivore functional traits” (equivalent to the already accepted concept of plant functional traits) and different ways to incorporate linkages between plant and herbivores into process-based models have been suggested [ 3 ••]. This issue is not limited to tropical or natural forests, as the influence of large herbivores on tree and shrub density in boreal [ 66 ] and temperate forests [ 67 ] has been reported, with or without management.

Other approaches to account for biodiversity include the use of habitat and species distribution models. They link the smallest (habitat) to the largest (distribution) spatial scales and provide a better understanding of the potential impacts of novel ecological conditions over the mid to long term. The dramatic increase of available data on climate, soils, and species distributions allows for finely gridded modelling at both temporal and spatial scales. This advance allows statistically based species distribution models to be linked to process-based models [ 16 , 68 ], although better understanding of absence data and improved inclusion of abiotic interactions will become crucial to estimate effects of climate change [ 69 , 70 ].

Finally, an always-important topic in forest models is the integration of management into modelling. Such integration has two clear foci: simulation of management practices and involvement of forest managers into the modelling process [ 71 ]. As forest management is inherently an ecological disturbance, including management simulation in forest modelling should not be limited to anthropogenic actions but should include natural disturbances as well. However, the main limitation that needs to be solved is the lack of information on the specific mechanisms that link climate change with disturbances [ 26 ]. This is especially important when several disturbances can be connected through cascading effects on the ecosystem [ 42 , 72 ].

Important conceptual advances in disaggregating disturbances into their constituent components and embedding disturbances into system dynamics have been recently completed [ 50 ••]. These authors have identified as important challenges the need for simulating nondeterministic competitive interactions between tree species and their responses to disturbances and suggest using life history traits to overcome this issue. However, although these linkages among disturbances have been long recognized in forestry, little research has actually incorporated them into forest models, particularly as multi-disturbance models [ 50 ••]. In addition, most models that incorporate disturbances predict probabilities for such disturbances to happen depending on different stand features, but not the disturbances effects [ 26 ]. Among disturbances, wildfire modelling is an important field by itself. As in the case of other disturbances, abiotic factors such as slope, elevation, distance to roads, or weather patterns are important for incorporating complexity at small spatial and temporal scales [ 73 ]. However, getting good quality for such small-scale variables could be a challenge in areas with dense forest cover and sparse road networks, as is the case in most tropical or boreal forests [ 74 ].

Another important step in making forest models more meaningful for stakeholders include modifying the way models are created. The focus on participatory processes in which model users and forest stakeholders interact with forest modelers during the inception of the modelling studies is being increasingly recognized as fundamental for the model to make actual impact in the forest sector [ 44 ]. This approach aims to bring nonacademic forest stakeholders into the process at the beginning, so they develop a sense of ownership of the research outcome and therefore are much more likely to implement the model outcomes. Three models for science-policy interaction have identified [ 74 ]: the “linear phase” when science informed policy-making in a unidirectional manner, the “interactive phase” when both sides found themselves in a continuous interaction, and the “embedded phase.” Our own experience is that the linear phase is still dominant in many regions, with scientists developing models and scenarios of their interest and then approaching nonacademic stakeholders with their results. Only in some scarce cases the interaction has progressed and moved into the second stage of science-policy interaction (i.e., [ 44 ]). It is then time to push towards a multi-actor approach (the second “interactive” phase of bringing science into practice). However, to achieve this goal, models need to be accessible, relevant, and user-friendly for non-modelers and address current forest management concerns to actually bring change into forestry practices [ 76 ]. A comparison on how different European decision support systems are facing these challenges has identified the need to incorporate forest owner behavior and accurate spatial analysis to better estimate landscape-level provisioning of ecosystem services [ 77 ].

Next Challenges for Forest Model Convergence

Understanding how complex ecosystems such as forests are structured and function as a system has been, still is, and will be challenging. The challenge lies in understanding how climate change affects forests, while our understanding on how to model forests under “normal” conditions is still far from complete. In addition to the most popular topics currently being explored in forest modelling discussed earlier, we have identified through our review several topics that deserve mention due to their relevance, even if they did not explicitly appear in the keyword map in Fig.  1 . Such topics include the following:

Small forests : Landscapes around the globe are becoming increasingly fractioned, making small forests of a few hectares or smaller increasingly common. Managers of such forests usually have limited resources to access and use models, and models usually lack representations of external factors (such as the vicinity of agriculture lands) that can be relevant for the functioning and structure of small forests [ 76 ].

Urban forests : As urban landscapes expand, urban forests are becoming very important in delivering a multitude of ecosystem services. However, urban forest models have been developed only for few regions around the world (i.e., USA, Europe, and China) and are mostly correlational in nature. To better assess the effects of climate change on ecosystem services, better linkages with ecophysiological mechanisms must be incorporated into urban forest models [ 49 ]. Among the potential ecosystem services that could be modelled in urban forests are not only carbon sequestration [ 78 ] but also aesthetic values [ 79 ].

The Global South : A recurrent finding in all recent forest modelling reviews is the strong bias towards North America and Europe [ 38 , 50 ••, 52 ], followed by East Asia to a lesser extent (mostly China and Japan). Some isolated modelling hotspots in the southern hemisphere are Australia (which has generated one of the most successful forest models, [ 51 ]) and Brazil (mostly focused on modelling plantation forests but also generated some work on Amazonian forests). More effort must be made to better understand the applicability of models from other regions to these areas that are underrepresented in the scientific modelling literature. This is an important research area given regional variations in terms of tree, understory and wildlife species composition, and other environmental constraints such as climate, edaphic factors, or human management models.

Overlooked physio-ecological processes : Two important mechanisms have attracted little attention in forest models until now. One is regeneration (including masting), which is now recognized as a process that can significantly affect biomass allocation and hence carbon and energy flows. Even if detailed conceptual models on forest regeneration have been available for some time (i.e., [ 80 ]), regeneration has usually been oversimplified in forest models [ 81 ]. However, recent important advances in understanding the masting process allow for the implementation of mechanistic models [ 82 ]. Giving the inherent complexity and current incomplete understanding of the process, modelling regeneration patterns could be a more practical approach than modelling processes in order to avoid error propagation, especially if models are to be scaled up to regional or larger areas [ 83 ••]. Another overlooked topic is root growth and function. Traditionally, the simulation of fine roots has been underdeveloped compared to leaves, and hence, a common approach has used allometric relationships of fine roots to other biomass fractions [ 84 ]. However, the latest research indicates that this is not always appropriate, but also that enough data for mechanistic root models are starting to be available [ 85 ]. Given the important role of roots in carbon, nutrient and water cycles, and the influence of such cycles on tree mortality [ 86 ], a more mechanistic modelling approach would be desirable.

Uncertainty assessment : Traditionally, the study of climate change effects on forest has relied on modelling different climate scenarios, management options, and their interactions. However, such an approach does not provide a clear picture of the uncertainty around model predictions. Hence, moving from scenario assessment towards uncertainty analysis has been proposed [ 56 •, 63 ]. To do so, using predictions from different models would be useful, particularly if the models use different approaches [ 16 ]. The viability of assessing uncertainty through using envelopes of models has been demonstrated and refined [ 19 , 87 ].

Conclusions

Our review of current trends in forest modelling has shown that climate change is the main driving force that is stimulating researchers to develop new approaches and methods to model forest ecosystems and forest managers to use such models. It has also shown that we are at an exciting moment, in which the development of new statistical and measurement techniques is finally creating opportunities for developing true inter-scale models, from individuals to regions and beyond. In addition, the present need to incorporate users into the modelling process is stronger than ever, and options exist to simplify science-based models into operational models without losing accurate representation of ecological patterns. However, the need to better understand ecological process is also more important than ever as climate, biodiversity, and land-use changes move forest ecology of the Earth to novel conditions. Hence, improving the mechanistic representation of ecological process in an integrative manner that moves beyond trees will be crucial for meaningful predictions of forest ecosystem development under novel conditions. In conclusion, we have shown that the traditional division between process-based and statistical models lacks actual meaning, as the major trend is towards cross-scale integration of different modelling approaches.

Data Availability

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

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Blanco, J.A., Lo, YH. Latest Trends in Modelling Forest Ecosystems: New Approaches or Just New Methods?. Curr. For. Rep. 9 , 219–229 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40725-023-00189-y

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A global systematic review of forest management institutions: towards a new research agenda

Jude ndzifon kimengsi.

1 Forest Institutions and International Development (FIID) Research Group, Chair of Tropical and International Forestry, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

2 Department of Geography, The University of Bamenda, Bamenda, Cameroon

Raphael Owusu

Shambhu charmakar, gordon manu.

3 Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Rome, Italy

Lukas Giessen

4 Chair of Tropical and International Forestry, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Associated Data

Globally, forest landscapes are rapidly transforming, with the role of institutions as mediators in their use and management constantly appearing in the literature. However, global comparative reviews to enhance comprehension of how forest management institutions (FMIs) are conceptualized, and the varying determinants of compliance, are lacking. And so too, is there knowledge fragmentation on the methodological approaches which have and should be prioritized in the new research agenda on FMIs.

We review the regional variations in the conceptualization of FMIs, analyze the determinants of compliance with FMIs, and assess the methodological gaps applied in the study of FMIs.

A systematic review of 197 empirically conducted studies (491 cases) on FMIs was performed, including a directed content analysis.

First, FMIs literature is growing; multi-case and multi-country studies characterize Europe/North America, Africa and Latin America, over Asia. Second , the structure-process conceptualization of FMIs predominates in Asia and Africa. Third , global south regions report high cases of compliance with informal FMIs, while non-compliance was registered for Europe/North America in the formal domain. Finally, m ixed-methods approaches have been least employed in the studies so far; while the use of only qualitative methods increased over time, the adoption of only quantitative approaches witnessed a decrease.

Future research should empirically ground informality in the institutional set-up of Australia while also valorizing mixed-methods research globally. Crucially, future research should consider multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to explore the actor and power dimensions of forest management institutions.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-022-01577-8.

Introduction

Globally, forests are at a crossroads—characterized by rapid transformation (Garcia et al. 2020 ). For instance, Global Forest Watch estimated that forest loss around the globe reached 29.7 million hectares as of 2016, indicating a 51% increase since 2015. For tropical forests, the loss was estimated at 12 million hectares (the size of Belgium) in 2018 (Weisse and Goldman 2017 ; Garcia et al. 2020 ). While such changes are linked to natural (e.g., climate change) and human-induced drivers such as land-use change (Rounsevell et al. 2006 ; Meyfroidt and Lambin 2011 ; Aguiar et al. 2016 ; Houghton and Nassikas 2018 ), they form part of a complex transformation system—mediated by socio-economic, political, and institutional forces (Malhi et al. 2014 ). This validates the role of institutions as a key enhancing or constraining factor in determining forest resources access, use and management (Cleaver 2017 ). Institutions are viewed as highly abstract and invisible conditions in the political environment. They constitute cognitive, normative, and regulatory structures which provide stability and meaning to social behaviour. Institutions are carried across multiple vehicles, including cultures, structures and routines, operating at multiple levels of jurisdiction (Scott 1995 ). The transformation of forest landscapes at various timescales is characterized by net tropical forest loss (Geist and Lambin 2002 ; Kissinger et al. 2012 ; Song et al. 2018 ). Furthermore, regional variations in the drivers (Curtis et al. 2018 ) exist: in Latin America, transformations are largely rooted in ranching and soybean expansion (Rudel et al. 2009 ; Verburg et al. 2014 ; Tyukavina et al. 2017 ), while subsistence agriculture drives the transformation process in Africa (Hosonuma et al. 2012 ; Tyukavina et al. 2018 ). Transformations in Asia are significantly linked to industrial processes and small-holder farming (Rudel et al. 2009 ; Turubanova et al. 2018 ).

While forests are declining (Weisse and Goldman 2017 ), their roles in the resolution of global socio-ecological challenges (e.g., climate change mitigation and poverty reduction) remain unrivalled (Oldekop et al. 2020 ; Nerfa et al. 2020 ). Scholars submit that governance mechanisms, especially the role of institutions, remain primordial in shaping forests access, use, and management. For this reason, institutions—the rules of the game—continually gain relevance (Agrawal and Gupta 2005 ; Dixon and Wood 2007 ; Kimengsi et al. 2021 ). Variations exist in the way institutions are conceptualized. For instance, following the structure process dichotomy (Fleetwood 2008a , b ), institutions relate to tissues of social relations linking groups and communities (structures) and a set of rules, conventions and values, among others (processes) (Fleetwood 2008a ; Bernardi et al. 2007 ). It is, however, difficult to provide a dividing line between the processes and structures; processes (rules) guide the formation of structures, while structures, on the other hand, oversee and enforce rules (Fleetwood 2008a ; Ntuli et al. 2021 ). However, structures differ from processes in terms of their functioning; structures could represent forest management organizations as an entity, and not the rules (processes) which they produce (Ntuli et al. 2021 ). Both structures and processes are subjected to a categorization as either formal (written and codified laws, largely state driven) and informal (unwritten or uncodified rules that transcend generations) (Osei-Tutu et al . 2014 ; Yeboah-Assiamah et al. 2017 ). Furthermore, and on the basis of source, institutions could be categorized following the endogenous—exogenous dichotomy; the former relates to community-specific complex and embedded rules, while the latter denotes institutions introduced by the state and international agencies (Yeboah-Assiamah et al. 2017 ; Kimengsi et al. 2022a , b , c ). By and large, these categories of institutions exist to provide order in the midst of ‘chaos’, with regards to the sustainable management of forest resources (Beunen and Patterson 2019 ).

While forest landscapes are transforming, institutions have also been subjected to several dimensions of change. Their evolution over time manifests through formation, reformation, disintegration, and modification in several contexts, including Africa (Haller et al. 2016 ; Friman 2020 ; Kimengsi et al. 2022a , b , c ), Asia (Haapal and White 2018 ; Steenbergen and Warren 2018 ), and Latin America (Faggin and Behagel 2018 ; Gebara 2019 ). This brings to fore the notion of ephemeral, intermittent and perennial institutions (Kimengsi et al. 2021 )—borrowed from the geographic classification of streams (Gomes et al. 2020 ). Ephemeral refers to short-term stream movements (institutional arrangements), intermittent is analogous to medium-term/seasonal streams (medium-term institutional arrangements), and perennial relates to streams that flow all through—analogous to more long-term, enduring institutions (Kimengsi et al. 2021 ). Therefore, the search for perennial (enduring) institutions is top on the scientific and policy agenda (Ostrom 1990 ; Kimengsi et al. 2021 ). This is important to support the attainment of objectives such as halting forest loss and improving forest cover and species diversity (Bare et al. 2015 ; Assa 2018 ), sustaining livelihoods and economic welfare (Buchenrieder and Balgah 2013 ; Foundjem-Tita et al. 2018 ), and engendering equity and fairness in the distribution of proceeds from forest systems (Faye et al. 2017 ). However, studies on institutions and institutional change are seemingly at an impasse; it seems difficult to proceed with the framing of forward-looking research questions linked to forest management institutions (FMIs). The impasse is rooted in the largely fragmented and unstructured institutional analysis around forest settings that harbor conflicts linked to emerging and persistent resource use inequalities (Gautam et al. 2004 ; Soliev et al. 2021 ). Additionally, the multiplicity of institutional variables and the lack of a consensus on which of the methods—qualitative or quantitative—is best suited for analyzing institutions and institutional change (Kimengsi et al. 2022a , b , c ) further validate the need to surmount this impasse. In this regard, a systematic review of the global knowledge base on FMIs is imminent. Furthermore, details on the methods to prioritize in future studies further validates the need for a review. Consequently, we seek answers to the following questions: (1) How have FMIs been conceptualized and analyzed globally? (2) How varied are the (non)compliance determinants and outcomes of FMIs? (3) How can we conceptually and methodologically advance research on FMIs? To provide answers to these interrogations, we undertake a review of FMIs. The study is inspired by an earlier review conducted in the context of sub-Saharan Africa (Kimengsi et al. 2022b ).

Materials and methods

Analytical framework.

In this review, we make use of the socio-ecological co-evolution framework (Pretzsch et al. 2014 ). The framework serves as a useful theoretical fundament to enhance understanding of the dynamics around forests and rural development. While allowing for the differentiation between humans and ecological subsystems, the framework also outlines the dynamic interactions between these two systems (Berkes et al. 1998 ; Pretzsch et al. 2014 ). The socio-ecological co-evolution framework is designed to enhance comprehension of the interactions between the social system (e.g., the community of forest users), the institutions that shape them, and the ecological system—forests. These interactions occur at the interface (management segment) of the framework. Besides providing a useful analytical lens to appreciate current levels of engagement in decision-making and the enforcement of institutional provisions, it also serves as a useful framework to understand how institutional change triggers the co-evolution of both ecological and social systems. The socio-ecological co-evolution framework is informed by the earlier works of Berkes et al. ( 1998 ), which bridged the hitherto divide between social research (centred around institutions), and ecological research, which emphasized cross-scale ecosystem dynamics. Worthy of note is the fact that other frameworks exist; for instance, the socio-ecological systems (SES) framework (Ostrom 2009 ) was proposed to explain complex systems involving resource systems (forests in this case), their resource units (e.g., timber), appropriators (e.g., timber exploiters), and governance systems (e.g., forest management rules) that continually interact to produce differential outcomes (Ostrom 2009 ). It explains that socio-ecological systems are constantly subjected to change. Some of these changes are rooted in institutions and institutional change processes (Rammel et al. 2007 ; Pretzsch et al. 2014 ). The socio-ecological co-evolution framework is employed for the following reasons: (1) with rapid transformations experienced in forest landscapes across the globe, scientific and policy circles need to extend their breadth of knowledge on how to further ‘marry’ social and ecological systems in forest management. (2) Institutional change is reflected through the decisions and actions of resource users at the interface of the framework. Therefore, understanding how these changes and their determinants precipitate (non)compliance is helpful in today’s dispensation, where forests are seen as crucial in stemming the upsurge of environmental crises. (3) The outcomes associated with the myriads of institutions need to be further appreciated to inform policy actors on the orientation of future FMIs. The socio-ecological co-evolution framework (Fig.  1 ) explains how changing societal demands and choices, influenced by the institutions in place, shape the type and magnitude of societal intervention in socio-ecological systems (e.g., forests).

Analytical framework for the systematic review.

Source: Based on Cleaver ( 2017 ), Haller et al. ( 2016 ), North ( 1990 ), Ostrom ( 1990 , 2005), and Pretzsch et al. ( 2014 ). NTFPs Non-Timber Forest Product

The review, guided by the research questions, focuses on the management phase and the social segment of the socio-ecological co-evolution framework. The management phase represents an interface—a point where management decisions under different forest categories such as plantation forests, forest reserves, community forests and landscapes in want of restoration, are implemented. Institutions and institutional change processes drive such decisions. The management operations are construed as forest-linked activities which are informed by institutions regulating timber and NTFPs exploitation, ecotourism, medicinal plants’ extraction and forest conservation. Institutional arrangements in this socio-ecological system culminate in the derivation of different management approaches, such as co-management and community-based forestry with a focus on livelihoods and conservation. The social segment of the framework focuses on the conceptualization of forest management institutions (for instance, structures vs processes, formal vs informal, and endogenous vs exogenous). This segment also captured forest management institutional compliance with an emphasis on the variations and determinants. The segment on outcomes explored the ecological, economic, socio-cultural, and political outcomes of FMIs. The framework also has a segment which explores methodological approaches employed in the study of FMIs.

Methodology

Data collection.

The systematic review approach (Nightingale 2009a , b ; Mengist et al. 2019 ) was employed in this study. Systematic reviews follow an established and standardized protocol for the search, appraisal and inclusion (or exclusion) of literature for subsequent analysis (Boell and Cecez-Kecmanovic 2015 ). This is different from the general review of literature which consists of a non-structured and highly subjective method of literature search and analysis (Kraus et al. 2020 ). The procedure was employed as follows: First a list of search terms (Appendix) was developed and used in the article search process. We targeted the following databases: Scopus, Science Direct, Google Scholar and Web of Science. Search terms such as forest management, forest governance, institutions, rules, norms, norms, laws, policies, community-based organizations, NGOs, associations, compliance, determinants, and outcomes were repeatedly employed in the search. The terms were combined with the respective regions (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe/North America, Latin America), over a 15-year period (2006–2021). It should be noted that Europe and North America were clustered due to the observed similarity in their societal fabric and culture. We considered this timespan good enough to mirror contemporary evidence on the question of forest management institutions (FMIs). The search led to the initial identification of 920 articles. Four hundred thirty articles were identified from Web of Science, 104 from Google Scholar, 348 from Scopus and 38 from the Science Direct database. The search on Google Scholar did not produce a lot of articles. This is because grey literature was not considered during the search. Our emphasis was to derive literature which were published in internationally recognized databases. We then proceeded to deduplicate the articles—the deduplication process led to a reduction to 680 articles. Furthermore, article screening was performed with emphasis on the abstracts. This informed the decision to include or exclude the paper. In the selection, we targeted journal articles that were published in English and were empirically grounded. In cases where the abstract could not provide these details, we proceeded to review the methods and conclusions to inform inclusion (or exclusion). We excluded all grey literature during the article selection. This reduced the number of manuscripts to 197 (see Supplementary Excel Sheet), from which we derived 491 case studies; the cases were derived by considering the number of study areas that were included for analysis. We use ArcMap 10.5 to generate the map of the globe and the regions and/or countries where most of the case studies in this review paper were concentrated.

Data analysis

The articles retained were further read, and following the analytical framework (Fig.  1 ), a directed content analysis was performed (Hsieh and Shannon 2005 ). The directed content analysis began with a relevant theoretical framework—in this case, the socio-ecological coevolution framework. This framework provided a clear focus for the research questions under review. The key variables which were outlined in the framework (Fig.  1 ) informed the clustering of the data generated from the selected articles. For the selected articles, we read the abstract, methods and conclusion sections to generate data. The dataset was compiled in an excel sheet and further read; key texts which contained variables of interest were highlighted. These variables were then clustered following the established questions and themes for further analysis (Mayring 2000 ). Therefore, the highlighted texts, which contained data corresponding to the four thematic sections, were extracted from each article and organized under the main themes: conceptualization of institutions, institutional compliance, outcomes of forest management institutions and methodological approaches . We approached the conceptualization of institutions following the structure-process dimension (Fleetwood 2008a ), the formal and informal dichotomy (North 1990 ), the endogenous vs exogenous institutional lens (Kimengsi et al. 2021 ) and the state vs community-based institutional dichotomy (Ntuli et al. 2021 ). Compliance denotes the extent to which forest users adhere to the institutional provisions in their communities. This translates to forest management outcomes which could be ecological, socio-economic and even political (Haller et al. 2016 ).

These were recorded in a Microsoft Excel sheet (Artmann and Sartison 2018 ). We considered this approach appropriate, considering that software extraction might ignore salient details owing to the complex nature of institutional variables. Besides narratives and content analysis, we used descriptive statistics to report the variations across the five regions. The descriptive analysis further aided in establishing institutional compliance and its determinants, the ecological, socio-cultural, economic, and political outcomes linked to forest management institutions, and the variations in methodological approaches employed.

Attributes of reviewed papers and case studies

The review indicated that most of the articles emanate from Africa and Latin America—home to two of the world’s major forest ecosystems. This was followed by Asia. Case-wise, the study captured a total of 491 cases drawn from 99 countries across the globe (Fig.  2 ). The highest number of cases emanate from Europe/North America and Africa. This suggests that multi-case and multi-country studies have been significantly prioritized in these regions compared to single case/country studies for Asia and Australia.

Spatial distribution of case studies on forest management institutions (2006–2021)

In parts of Central Europe, studies to explore shifts towards new governance established that recent changes in institutional arrangements result from macro-political trends and the geopolitical strategy of some states (Sergent et al. 2018 ). In the United States and Canada, forest certification led to substantial changes in practices as enterprises embraced changes in forestry, environmental, social, and economic/system practices in the realm of forest certification (Moore et al. 2012 ). In the case of Africa, a comparative study of 38 countries reported that the activities of multinational corporations are associated with differential losses in forest cover—linked to weak governance (institutions) (Assa 2018 ). The review clearly shows that while political, geostrategic and religious forces defined the institutional change process in Europe/North America, economic interests through multinational companies shaped institutional change in Africa. The review established that some of the significant countries with regards to cases include Australia, Ecuador, and Germany (21 + cases). In addition, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Ghana, and Canada, India registered between 8 and 14 cases, while the remaining countries registered between 1 and 7 cases (Fig.  2 ).

Temporal evolution of papers and cases on forest management institutions

On the whole, the literature on institutions has grown over the last 15 years(Fig.  3 ). This could be linked to renewed interests to understand governance mishaps and to engage in getting institutions (including FMIs) right . In all, while the number of publications increased from 2006, the review shows that it witnessed a decline in 2009 and 2012. The growth in the literature is possibly explained by the interest to uncover institutional ‘relicts’ (in Africa) and rising environmental challenges in Latin America (bushfires and migration). Formal forest management institutions (structure and process) for forest products have received much attention in the 2000s literature. However, significant growth was observed in the literature of the 2010s, which included both formal (international) and informal (traditional and local) institutions and concepts such as ecosystem services, sustainable forest management, farm forestry, biodiversity, REDD + , and forest certification. This classification increasingly accommodated the use of endogenous and exogenous institutions, as well as state and community-based institutions. However, both classifications have been (mis)construed to represent formal and informal institutions.

Temporal evolution of papers on forest institutions across the globe for the past 15 years

Conceptualization of forest management institutions

From a structural dimension, institutions have been most conceptualized as structures in Asia and Africa. These predominate the informal structures where Asia and Africa account for 35% and 28%, respectively, of the review’s literature reporting on informal institutional structures. Latin America closely follows them with 22%. Literature from Asia and Africa further dominates in the classification of formal institutional structures with 28% and 25%, respectively. This is closely followed by Europe/North America (23%). Asia and Africa are ‘pace-setters” in the implementation of new forest management paradigms such as community-based forest management (Kimengsi and Bhusal, 2022 ). The introduction of these models saw the multiplication of management structures to oversee them. This explains why the literature significantly captures the structural dimension of institutions. Process-wise, literature from Asia and Africa accounts for 48% and 30%, respectively, of the literature on informal institutions, while Australia surprisingly reports none. In the formal domain, Asia, Europe/North America, and Latin America account for over 60% of the literature reporting the formal conceptualization of institutions (Table ​ (Table1 1 ).

Total number of papers (studies) = 197

Literature from Africa and Asia showed similarities in the conceptualization of institutions (Table ​ (Table2); 2 ); informal structures, for instance, chieftaincy and women groups, define and enforce processes (rules) which are conceived, for example, as taboos, beliefs, traditions, and customary rules. Studies in Cameroon and Burkina Faso in Africa report on bricolage manifestations involving formal and informal institutions (Kimengsi and Balgah 2021 ; Friman 2020 ), and the spatial variations in traditional institutions (Kimengsi et al. 2021 , 2022b ). In Europe/North America, the literature shows that informal structural institutions are conceptualized sparingly to include community leadership and inter-community forestry associations. Formally, they are reported as forest owners’ associations, political parties, protected area management, timber industry associations, resident associations, and state forest management. Informally, processes are conceived as local rules, while formally, they represent forest management policy, regulations, legal framework, local community forest governance, forest management strategies and forest marketing strategies. In Latin America, forest user groups, indigenous organizations and community management committees are frequently used in informal characterization, while labour unions, national services of protected areas, REDD + working group and Community general assemblies are used formally.

Global conceptualization of forest management institutions

Local land management rules constitute the key informal process in Latin America, while conservation laws, community-based forest policy, forest codes, forest laws, forest tenure agreements, and decentralized environmental policy appear in the formal conception of institutions. On the whole, a more diverse conceptualization of institutions (structures and processes) appear in the literature from Africa and Asia, followed by Latin America. The diversity is rooted in the diverse ethnic arrangements which characterize these regions. Africa, is the most ethnically diverse region in the world (Fearon 2003 ). This diversity accounts for the diversity in the nomenclature employed for forest management institutions—leading to the diversity in their conceptualization. With more empirical cases emanating from these settings, it is plausible to suggest that more in-depth and varied analysis about forest management institutions has been explored in these settings. Furthermore, the plethora of governance challenges in the management of natural resources (forest in this case) which is associated with such settings further explains the multifarious typification of institutions. In another dimension, structures and processes are surprisingly only conceptualized formally in the context of Australia—suggesting a significant drift away from informality to the pursuit of more formal, state-sanctioned institutions.

Compliance with forest management institutions

From the review, Africa, Asia, and Latin America report the highest cases of compliance in the informal institutional set-up. These settings have had a history linked to traditional institutions which were made to interact with colonially shaped institutions during their history. However, some degree of closeness to cultural institutions could be reported for these regions. The existence of compliance in the literature for Africa, Asia and Latin America is enough pointer to the multiplicity of institutional structures and processes which require monitoring against (non)compliance. Additionally, the interaction between formal and informal institutions, including the fallouts of colonial influence, led to the multiplicity of institutions. This possibly explains why compliance predominates the literature in the three regions. In Africa, for instance, pre-colonial types of resource use included the royal hunting preserves of the amaZulu and amaSwati people, and the kgotla system of land management practiced by the Batswana people (Ghai 1992 ; Fabricius 2004 ). Further, the making of access and use rules for natural resources in Mali (Moorehead 1989 ) and Botswana (Ostrom 1990 ), all indicate how endogenous cultural institutions shaped forest use. Likewise, Khasi, Garo and Jaintia tribes in Meghalaya of India, and traditional customary organization “Lembaga Adat” in Indonesia have not only conserved forest resources but also ensured its capacity to deliver ecosystem goods and services in sustainable manner (Mehring et al. 2011 ; Tiwari et al. 2013 ). Europe/North America registered few studies on informal institutional compliance, while this was non-existent for Australia—apparently due to the non-reported case of informal arrangements. Regarding non-compliance, articles from Latin America reported the highest case of non-compliance. This could be explained by the progressive decline in the informal institutions due to globalization and market forces which seemed to have permeated communities around the Amazon (Blundo-Canto et al. 2020 ). In the formal domain, non-compliance was significantly registered for Europe/North America, Africa, and Latin America (Fig.  4 ).

Global statistics of institutional compliance and non-compliance by regions. Left chart—papers ( N  = 197, n for compliance = 133, n for non-compliance = 64, Right chart—Cases ( N  = 491, n for compliance = 362, n for non-compliance = 129). Note Some papers reported compliance/compliance to formal and informal institutions simultaneously

It is important to note that some of the evoked reasons behind (non)compliance still require further investigation. For example, significant contextual variations in peoples’ attitudes and adherence to forest-sector institutions and governance in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America are directly linked to the disparities of key underlying and broader factors such as institutional models and policy frameworks for decentralization (Shackleton et al. 2002 ; Ribot 2003 ; Larson 2012 ; Mustalahti et al. 2020 ). Thus, a broader focus on institutional factors—rather than isolated reasons—is important to sufficiently explain (non-)compliance dynamics.

Forest management Institutional compliance determinants

From the analysis, political and economic factors were recurrent in the literature as key forces that influence institutional compliance. For instance, in Europe/North America, Latin America and Australia, political factors significantly influenced compliance (Table ​ (Table3). 3 ). Some of these key determinants include conflicts, policy enforcement, power relations and governance structure (Latin America) and actor network, policy development, and governance structure (Europe/North America). Politics and geostrategy contributed to defining natural resource (forest in this case) institutions in Europe and North America. However, in Latin America, the rise in challenges linked to migration and bush fires also stand as key determinants of forest management institutional compliance. Economic factors in Europe/North America and Africa determined compliance. In Africa, economic factors linked to private enterprises and market-based mechanisms significantly featured in the literature as determinants of institutional compliance. For instance, aspects linked to donor income/investment and material aid, community forest expenditure and benefits, poverty were common. In Europe/North America, the economic viability of forest land use, forest certification, amongst others, were reported in the articles. In Nigeria, economic incentives (incomes) from farming activities, NTFPs use and non-traditional employment shaped compliance (Ezebilo 2011 ). On the whole, ecological, socio-cultural and demographic factors did not significantly explain compliance with forest management institutions. The case of ecological determinants in surprising given the litany of ecological campaigns which have been introduced in Africa (e.g., Leventon et al. 2014 ; Senganimalunje et al. 2016 ), Asia (Gilani et al. 2017 ) and Latin America (Entenmann and Schmitt 2013 ; Kowler et al. 2020 ) for instance, to foster conservation. Furthermore, socio-cultural diversity as viewed in Africa warrants some diversity in the way people adhere to institutions—both formal and informal. In Tanzania, trust in institutions was a significant predictor of participation intensity of the households in forest management (Luswaga and Nuppenau 2020 ). However, in Europe, differences in the attitudes of actors with regard to pursuing sustainable development significantly shaped compliance with forest management institutions (Jankovska et al. 2010 ).

Forest management institutional compliance determinants to by regions

Forest management institutional outcomes

The review indicates that political outcomes were the most significant for Europe/North America, followed by Latin America and Australia (Table ​ (Table4). 4 ). Some key political outcomes included policy fragmentation, market formation failures, and reduced legitimacy of FSC certification (Europe/North America). This is understandable, considering that political and geostrategic forces were key determinants of institutional compliance. In Latin America,the setting up of provincial regulations which undermine enforcement of forest regime, rule breaking, challenges with the day-to-day operational institutions, inequitable benefit-sharing mechanism; the absence of law enforcement on sustainability of and access to non-wood forest products were common. Rule breaking is potentially triggered by increasing in-migration and the upsurge of bushfires. Bottazzi et al. ( 2014 ) showed how incentive-based systems of institutions facilitated the allocation and use of funds in REDD + programmes. In all these, deforestation persisted in the midst of lost and/or bypassed institutions (Carvalho et al. 2019 ). In Australia, divergent views characterized the seeking of solutions to enhance inter-departmental and inter-municipal coordination (Ordóñez et al. 2020 ). Positive ecological outcomes were significantly reported for Africa (forest or biodiversity protection/conservation, improved forest condition and surface water quality, sustainable forest or ecosystem management, planting of timber and fruit trees) and Latin America (fostering forest conservation, stabilization and/or decrease of deforestation, sustainable forest management). Furthermore, Europe/North America, Africa and Asia respectively reported positive economic outcomes linked to the generation of net monetary gains from parks, and from the wood harvesting and marketing (Europe/North America), higher incomes derived from certification, profits derived under community forestry, and the augmentation of household cash income (Africa). In Asia, studies report the positive outcomes linked to the forests’ substantial contribution to local livelihoods and income (Muhammed et al. 2008 ; Harada and Wiyono 2014 ; Barnes and van Laerhoven 2015 ).

Forest management institutional outcomes by regions

Some case studies have multiple institutional outcomes

Australia witnessed the most negative ecological outcomes. For instance, regional forest agreements were characterized by poor governance, leading to failures in biodiversity protection and ecosystem maintenance. This further precipitated the over-commitment of forest resources to wood production (Lindenmayer 2018 ). In Latin America, significant deforestation was observed for the Guarayos Indigenous Territory from 2000 to 2017—primarily driven by agricultural commodity production (He et al. 2019 ), while in Africa, Garekae et al. ( 2020 ) reported forest and wildlife decline in Botswana, linked to sectoral bias. Furthermore, the articles reported significant negative economic outcomes for Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Some of the reported outcomes include financial resource decline (Latin America), the timber-centric and market-oriented nature of community forests (Asia) (Bhusal et al. 2020 ), and the manifestations of elite capture in Africa. In Malawi, for instance, co-management programmes did not lead to positive outcomes, i.e., community organization, forest access, forest product availability and commercialization of forest products (Senganimalunje et al. 2016 ). On the whole socio-cultural outcomes were prevalent in Australia, Europe/North America, and Asia. Here, reported issues were linked to public acceptance of plantation policy, the improvement in communication of forest owners' associations and increased reliance on informal relationships. A case in point is linked to forest policy in Australia which led to several negative social impacts, including uncertainty, perceived injustice, and financial stress (Loxton et al. 2014 ). In the case of Asia, it was linked to inequalities among local actors, demographic changes and transformations in local social structures, gender inequality, successful collaboration between NGOs and community-based organizations , conflicts between communities and state forest enterprises (Adhikari and Lovett 2006 ; Barnes and van Laerhoven 2015 ).

Methodological approaches

The analysis reveals that globally mixed methods approaches have been least prioritized in the study of forest management institutions. For instance, between 2006 and 2021, we observed a growing trend in the application of qualitative methods; only 2 articles were reported in 2007, while this peaked to 99 in 2021. However, the use of quantitative and mixed methods approaches was significantly lower (Fig.  5 ). Considering the intricacies linked to the study of institutions, the prioritization of qualitative approaches is understandable. However, with growing interest in employing more robust data collection and analysis methods, it is only germane to report that studies have not prioritized mixed methods approaches so far (Malina et al. 2011 ; Karolina et al. 2021 ).

Cumulative distribution of paper and adoption of methods

A slight increase in the application of mixed methods approaches is observed (Table ​ (Table5) 5 ) from 22% between 2006 and 2010 to 26% between 2016 and 2021, while there was a progressive decline in the sole application of quantitative methods from 37 to 23% within this time period. A slight decrease is also observed for qualitative methods, from 54 to 51% between 2011 and 2021.

Methods employed over time in the study of forest management institutions (% in parenthesis)

On the whole, while the use of only qualitative methods in the study of forest management institutions increased over time, the adoption of only quantitative approaches witnessed a decrease (Table ​ (Table5). 5 ). Studies in Africa have largely prioritized the sole application of quantitative methods, as 42% of the papers reported this approach (Table ​ (Table6), 6 ), while mixed methods (25%) were least prioritized. This could be linked to the growing ‘quantification revolution’ in research across the region. While quantitative analysis provides some pointers to institutional questions, they hide significant intricacies which could be revealed by solely qualitative or, better still, mixed methods analytical approaches. In Latin America, however, a significant proportion of the studies (40%) employed solely qualitative methods, followed by mixed methods (35%) and then quantitative methods (26%). Likewise, the highest proportion (58%) of studies draw from qualitative methods in Asia and Australia, whereas mixed-methods were prioritized as the second highest (37%) in Asia and the least (10%) in Australia (Table ​ (Table6 6 ).

Methods used by different continents (percentage in parenthesis)

On the whole, while studies in Africa employed more of only quantitative methods over qualitative ones, research on forest management institutions in Europe and North America prioritized only qualitative methods over only quantitative ones. In North America/Europe, 73% of the studies employed the qualitative approach, followed by quantitative (19%). The least employed approach is mixed-methods, as only 8% used this approach (Table ​ (Table6). 6 ). Overall, qualitative methods have been significantly employed globally except in Africa, while mixed methods were the least adopted in all regions except Asia and Latin America.

Perspectives on the conceptual and methodological advancement of research on FMIs

The literature so far presents a fragmented conceptualization of forest management institutions. For instance, institutions are broadly categorized as formal or informal on the one hand and as exogenous and endogenous on the other hand. This is based on the premise that not all endogenous institutions are informal institutions. A more detailed conceptualization which captures the formal and informal dimension, including the endogenous and exogenous categorization, is helpful to advance theoretical developments in the field of institutions in relation to forest management. Additionally, institutions seem to exhibit stream-like attributes; an approach which further conceptualizes them as ephemeral (very short-term arrangements made by forest actors to facilitate forest resource use conflict minimization), partially enduring ( arrangements that temporarily become a norm but fizzle out as new actors take over (Kimengsi et al. 2022b ); and enduring ( institutions are either codified (formal) and/or take the status of customs and values which transcend several generations (Ostrom 1990 ). In both cases, empirical studies geared towards establishing these proposed conceptual approaches are needed. Future research also needs to advance the “marriage” between actors and institutions.

From a methodological standpoint, further studies should prioritize methods based reviews (Palmatier et al. 2018 ) to enable researchers synthesize in detail, the design and instruments used so far, the approaches employed in data collection approaches and pros and cons linked to the methods employed. This will further inform the application of methodological approaches and instruments for future empirical studies on forest management institutions. Also, multi-country studies, employing mixed-methods approaches are needed to analyze institutions in forest use and management.

Review Limitations

This review provides an initial synthesis of the literature on forest management institutions from a global perspective. It is helpful in the identification of region-specific research needs in the ever-evolving field of institutions. A couple of limitations could be raised: Firstly, the conceptual analysis of institutions does not incorporate the exogenous versus endogenous dichotomy. With growing interest to further explore the typology and source of institutions, including whether management outcomes are a function of more endogenous or exogenous institutional arrangements (Kimengsi et al. 2022b ), future reviews and empirical studies should incorporate this dimension. Secondly, the regional clustering of institutions might shade details linked to how institutions are conceptualized and the outcomes they effectively produce. Although case studies are used, it is not possible in a single review to derive all these conceptual details, which might vary even within regions. Taking Africa, for instance, diversity in the region’s culture requires country-specific analysis of institutions. Latin America’s diversity precipitates ‘institutional shopping’ (Wartmann et al. 2016 Thirdly, institutions do not operate in isolation—therefore an actor-centred/power dimension is required to better appreciate institutional arrangements (Giessen et al. 2014 ; Ongolo et al. 2021 ). Therefore, a review of the actor and power dimensions of institutions is required to inform subsequent empirical studies. Fourthly, while the paper reports on compliance, the level of compliance is not reported, and the factors which militate for or against compliance. Fifthly, we selected articles which were exclusively published in English language and indexed in certain data bases. In doing so, we ignored papers which might have been published in French, Spanish, Amharic, Kiswahili, Nepali and other languages; such articles might have provided further compelling details on the region-specific dynamics of forest management institutions. We call for subsequent reviews to aim at valorizing such studies.

The current socio-ecological outcomes linked to the upsurge of pandemics (e.g. COVID-19) further justify the need to pay more attention to the management of forests and forest resources (Tollefson 2020 ; Saxena et al. 2021). These details, which vary over space and time, and may potentially assume a different dimension under the current COVID-19 scenario (Saxena et al. 2021), require extensive review and further empirical grounding. When pandemic prevention hinges on forest management to some extent, it is imperative to further explore the role of FMIs. Further reviews could emphasize the extent of compliance and the conditions under which (non)compliance prevails in the context of pandemics. Additionally, institutional change which is triggered by health crises (e.g., pandemics) still needs to be further established.

Finally, our review of the methods focused on providing a snapshot of the approaches, following the broad categorization of qualitative, quantitative and methods. This does not provide details on the specific qualitative methods employed (e.g., key informant interviews, participant observations, vignettes, focus group discussions). Future methods-based reviews should consider these.

To define conceptual and methodological pathways for future studies on forest management institutions (FMIs), this study undertakes a systematic review of the literature on FMIs using 197 papers (491 cases). From the study, the following conclusions are plausible: Firstly, while forest management institutions literature has witnessed a growth, this is most significant in Africa and Latin America. Secondly, the structure-process conceptualization of institutions (formal and informal) predominates in Asia and Africa. Process-wise, studies from Australia surprisingly did not report on a single process-linked institution. This merits further studies which pays attention to the identification of such institutions. The literature also reports on the drift away from informality to the pursuit of more formal, state-sanctioned institutional arrangements in Australia. Thirdly , global south regions—Africa, Asia, and Latin America—report the highest cases of compliance in the informal institutional set-up, while non-compliance was significantly registered for Europe/North America in the formal domain. Fourthly , politico-economic factors significantly influence institutional compliance in Europe/North America, while economic factors shape compliance in Africa. On the whole, ecological, socio-cultural, and demographic factors were reported to less significantly explain compliance with forest management institutions (FMIs). Fifthly , while forest management institutions in Europe/North America significantly contributed to determining politico-economic outcomes, those in Africa and Latin America contributed to positive ecological and negative economic outcomes. Finally, mixed methods approaches have been least prioritized in the study of forest management institutions; in Africa, the sole application of quantitative methods was prioritized. Future research needs to (1) extend the conceptualization of institutions, (2) increase multi-case and multi-country studies on FMIs especially for Asia and Australia, (3) empirically ground informality in the institutional set up of forest management in Australia, (4) establish in detail, the extent of (non)compliance, their spatio-temporal variations, and determinants, and (5) valorize the application of mixed-methods approaches in the study of FMIs across the globe.

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)—Projektnummer (437116427), Grant ID: F-010300-541-000-1170701.

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Contributor Information

Jude Ndzifon Kimengsi, Email: [email protected]_eduj , Email: [email protected] .

Raphael Owusu, Email: moc.oohay@usuwo60leahpar .

Shambhu Charmakar, Email: [email protected] .

Gordon Manu, Email: [email protected] .

Lukas Giessen, Email: [email protected] .

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Hurricanes jeopardize carbon-storing New England forests

Study finds carbon-offset programs insufficiently account for future storm risks.

As American companies and public policies strive to mitigate their carbon dioxide emissions, many are relying on carbon offsets to reduce their carbon footprint, especially those who have pledged to achieve "net-zero emissions."

Sequestering carbon in forests is an example of a nature-based solution that is being used to address climate change, but a new study suggests that hurricanes could pose a risk.

Offset programs involve investments organizations or individuals can make in projects that cut carbon emissions, such as solar energy, or that can store carbon, such as preserving and enhancing forests.

As it happens, New England is one of the most heavily forested regions in the U.S. with Maine at 83%, New Hampshire at 80%, and Vermont at 74%.

In the California carbon market, the largest regulatory U.S. carbon market, 3% of a carbon offset project is reserved for catastrophic risks such as hurricanes and other storm events.

Wildfires, which comprise their own separate risk category, can also deplete forests that store carbon, known as "carbon stocks," and have typically been the focus of prior research on disturbances to such stocks.

The study finds that a single hurricane may wipe out 5% to 10% of total aboveground forest carbon, through tree damage, in New England. The results are published in Global Change Biology .

"Our results reveal that carbon offset programs in the U.S. do not adequately account for the risk of hurricanes, as a single storm could wipe out everything the program has set aside to ensure against risk," says lead author Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Dávila, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth and investigator at Harvard Forest where he conducted this work.

While New England hasn't experienced many severe hurricanes in recent decades, they are an important driver of long-term ecosystem change. The Hurricane of 1938, for example, caused widespread tree damage in New England, leading to the salvaging of 500 million board feet of lumber in the Granite State alone, according to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.

Hurricanes obtain their energy from the ocean and typically impact the southeastern coastal regions of the U.S.; however, they are a dominant disturbance agent in the Northeast as well.

"As the climate warms and sea surface temperatures continue to rise, hurricanes could get stronger and will have the capacity to stay on land longer, with the potential to move inland and northward into the heavily forested regions of the Northeast," says Tumber-Dávila.

For the study, the research team examined the 10 most powerful hurricanes that had an impact on land in New England over the past century, including Hurricane Bob in August 1991, and analyzed how the region's forests would be impacted if one of those storms were to hit today.

They mapped the trees -- the aboveground forest carbon in New England -- using USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program data and mapped the hurricanes using tracking and wind speed data to simulate a storm's path and strength in a geographic area. They determined how susceptible a forest was to wind damage based on the height and type of the trees. The team applied meteorological predictions to estimate the potential future strength of hurricanes.

The study finds that a projected 8% and 16% increase in hurricane wind speeds leads to a nearly 11- and 25-fold increase in high-severity impacts that would likely cause widespread tree death.

"In the context of climate change mitigation, the forest sector is unique in that carbon moves both into and out of the system," says senior author Jonathan Thompson, a senior ecologist and research director at Harvard Forest, which is based in Petersham, Massachusetts. "When mitigation programs look to forests, they often focus only on carbon moving into the forest through sequestration but our research shows the potential for carbon to move back into the atmosphere via hurricanes."

To estimate how long it would take for the forest carbon to be emitted from the downed trees due to the given hurricane, the researchers took into account wood decay rates and estimated the timber products that could be made from the salvaged wood based on regional timber product reports.

The results show that it takes nearly 19 years for trees knocked over by a hurricane to become a net emission and 100 years for most of the downed carbon (90%) to be emitted.

One hurricane however, can lead to the release of the 10-year equivalent of carbon sequestered in New England's forests.

Tumber-Dávila says the study suggests that future hurricanes need to be considered as using New England forests to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere becomes more popular.

"If forest carbon stocks are going to continue to be used as a nature-based climate solution, we have to be critical about evaluating its longevity and risks, to make sure that we're doing something that actually has an impact," says Tumber-Dávila.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Dartmouth College . Original written by Amy Olson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Shersingh Joseph Tumber‐Dávila, Taylor Lucey, Emery R. Boose, Danelle Laflower, Agustín León‐Sáenz, Barry T. Wilson, Meghan Graham MacLean, Jonathan R. Thompson. Hurricanes pose a substantial risk to New England forest carbon stocks . Global Change Biology , 2024; 30 (4) DOI: 10.1111/gcb.17259

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2023 saw some of the biggest, hardest-fought labor disputes in recent decades

The nearly four-month actors’ strike against major Hollywood production studios in 2023 was the second-largest labor dispute in the United States in at least three decades, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal data through Nov. 30.

By the time the strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) ended on Nov. 8, it had idled 160,000 workers for 82 workdays. That resulted in 13,120,000 “days idle,” a metric that the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to describe the impact of work stoppages.

Given the spate of high-profile labor disputes in 2023 and what’s been reported as unions’ greater willingness to confront management , we wanted to take a closer look at the history of labor actions in the United States.

Our source for this analysis was the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ database of “major work stoppages,” which has summary figures starting in 1947 and detailed monthly information about individual stoppages since 1993. The agency defines as “major” any work stoppage that involves at least 1,000 workers and lasts at least one full shift during the work week. (The term “work stoppage” encompasses both strikes by workers and lockouts by management. The workers involved may or may not be unionized.)

Unless the context indicates otherwise, all of the analyses in this post are based on stoppages beginning in a given calendar year, rather than all stoppages in effect during a calendar year.

When calculating total days idled, the BLS counts only days that employees are normally scheduled to work (Monday through Friday, excluding federal holidays) but don’t work due to a stoppage. The agency adjusts its calculations if the number of workers involved changes during a stoppage.

Since 1993, when the BLS began keeping detailed monthly statistics on major work stoppages, the only labor dispute to have a greater impact was a strike over actors’ pay for appearing in commercials by the then-separate SAG and AFTRA in 2000. (The two unions merged in 2012.) That strike, against the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers, lasted nearly six months, resulting in 17.3 million days idle and, reportedly, considerable bitterness and division among union members .

Beyond the SAG-AFTRA strike, 2023 was the most active year overall for major labor disputes in more than two decades, according to our analysis of BLS data on major work stoppages. The BLS defines major stoppages as those involving 1,000 or more workers and lasting at least one full shift during the Monday-Friday work week.

Through the end of November, 30 major stoppages had begun in 2023 – the most of any year since 2000. The 2023 stoppages involved a total of 464,410 workers, the second-most since 1986. And several of last year’s stoppages lasted long enough to generate 16.7 million total days idle, more than any year since 2000.

Besides the SAG-AFTRA strike, other significant stoppages last year included:

• The Writers Guild strike against the same group of production companies (11,500 workers idled for 102 workdays; 1,173,000 days idle)
• The United Auto Workers strike against Ford, General Motors, Mack Trucks and Stellantis (53,700 workers, 43 workdays, 925,900 days idle)
• A strike by a coalition of unions against health care company Kaiser Permanente (75,600 workers, three workdays, 226,800 days idle)

While 2023 stands out against the past few decades for its labor strife, it appears less turbulent if one goes back further in U.S. history.

From 1947, the earliest year for which the BLS provides comparable annual data on major work stoppages, through the 1970s, the U.S. routinely experienced hundreds of stoppages a year. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of workers were involved.

The peak was arguably in 1952, when there were 470 major work stoppages involving more than 2.7 million workers. Those stoppages created 48.8 million days idle, the third-most on record. (The top year for days idle was 1959, with 60.9 million, but there were fewer major stoppages that year and fewer workers were involved.)

Whether measured by raw numbers, workers involved or days idle, major work stoppages generally became less common after about 1980 – though not without occasional upsurges. The U.S. economy grew away from its heavily unionized manufacturing sectors , and the federal government under then-President Ronald Reagan turned hostile to organized labor . In 2009, for instance, only five major work stoppages took place, involving a total of just 12,500 workers.

In more recent years, relatively few major stoppages have occurred in traditional manufacturing sectors. From January 2018 through November 2023, just 13 out of 122 major stoppages (11%) involved manufacturing. That compares with 77 out of 176 (44%) between 1993 and 1997.

Instead, major work stoppages in recent years have tended to occurr in two service sectors: education and health care. Nearly two-thirds (65%, or 79 out of 122) of all major stoppages that began between January 2018 and November 2023 were in those two sectors.

The information sector has also seen notable labor actions in recent years. For instance, before the SAG-AFTRA strikes, there was a six-week strike against Verizon in 2016 (36,500 workers involved, 1.2 million days idle) and a strike by 1,800 electrical workers against cable-television giant Charter Communications that started in 2017 and lasted over five years .

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Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at Pew Research Center

A look at small businesses in the U.S.

Majorities of adults see decline of union membership as bad for the u.s. and working people, a look at black-owned businesses in the u.s., from businesses and banks to colleges and churches: americans’ views of u.s. institutions, older workers are growing in number and earning higher wages, most popular.

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The Political Ecology of Forest Management Across the Tropics

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Tropical forests, often referred to as the lungs or kidneys of the world, are the most important forest type on the planet as they are home to the largest share of biodiversity that our planet supports. They are also the sources of the largest freshwater rivers on the planet, supporting billions of people. ...

Keywords : Tropical forests, Policies, People and livelihoods, Forest loss, Rights

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Couch Biomedical Research Building, Taylor Avenue Building, 4444 Forest Park Ave., Bernard Becker Medical Library, Core@718, East Imaging Center, Biotechnology Center, 4511 Forest Park, 620 S Taylor, North Medical Building-Elevator Service Interruption 5/6-10/2024

Elevators in these buildings will be out of service for about 2 to 4 hours between 7:00 am and 3:30 pm on May 6th, through May 10th, to conduct annual inspections and fire recall tests as required by the Elevator Safety Unit of the Missouri Department of Public Safety. The elevators will be selected on a priority basis depending on customer needs and technical requirements.

The following elevators will be tested: Couch: #123, #124, #125 TAB: #128 4444: #63, #64, #65, #66 LIB: #41, #42 Core @718: #35 EIR: #49 BTC: #51, #52 4511: #106, #107 TAB Ext: #130 NOR: #32

ESG Rulemaker to Research Biodiversity and Workforce Disclosures

By Michael Kapoor

A global rulemaker decided Tuesday to research just two of four proposed topics for new standard setting—biodiversity and workforce skills—as it concentrates on helping companies use existing reporting rules.

All 14 International Sustainability Standards Board members voted in favor of researching a new standard on biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services reporting. Thirteen supported looking into the knowledge and experience of a company’s staff, known as human capital.

The board decided not to look into another two possible topics listed as priorities in a May 2023 consultation document: human rights and integrating sustainability and financial reporting. The votes came as the ...

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