Efficient FORest Management Strategies for Ecosystem Service provision

PI : Géraldine Bocqueho (UMR 356 Laboratoire d’Economie Forestière – LEF)

Collaborations : Léa Tardieu (UMR 356 Laboratoire d’Economie Forestière – LEF)

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Context — Forest area has increased in metropolitan France by 0.7% per year since 1980. Today, forests cover 30% of the French metropolitan surface and are home to numerous animal and vegetal species. In addition to the supply of wood products, forests provide a large number of ecological and social benefits like climate regulation, nutrients cycling, water quality regulation, recreation. Quantifying and mapping the supply of such services is crucial to enhance landscape multifunctionality, and support decisions in terms of spatial planning and land-use management.

Objectives — The objective is to examine how management practices can reconcile economic, ecological and social objectives in forest areas. More precisely we will assess synergies and trade-offs between different forest ecosystem services, accounting for spatial heterogeneity in land use, and explore the spatial pattern of service provision. We will finally define cost-effective strategies for forest management to maximize the joint supply of ecosystem services.

Approaches — We will develop a spatially-explicit forest model integrating multiple ecosystem services under different management options, including even-aged forest, uneven-aged forest and reserve forest. We will determine production possibility frontiers to assess synergies and trade-offs between the different ecosystem services under study, namely wood supply, global climate regulation (trough carbon sequestration and storage), and recreation. Conservation of biodiversity will be set as a constraint. The model will be applied to the Ballons des Vosges Regional Nature Park.

Expected results and impacts — We anticipate that the proposed approach will help public authorities and forest owners in the Ballons des Vosges park to identify best locations for the provision of specific ecosystem service bundles and to implement cost-effective management strategies optimizing service supply. As a further step, policy tools aiming at fostering such strategies will be tested with the model.