Quantifying climate change effects on future forest biomass availability using yield tables improved by mechanistic scaling.

Forests and wood products play a major role in climate change mitigation strategies and the transition from a fossil-based economy to a circular bioeconomy. Accurate estimates of future forest productivity are crucial to predict the carbon sequestration and wood provision potential of forests. Since long, forest managers have used empirical yield tables as a cost-effective and reliable way to predict forest growth. However, recent climate change-induced growth shifts raised doubts about the long-term validity of these yield tables. In this study, we propose a methodology to improve available yield tables of 11 tree species in the Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium. The methodology uses scaling functions derived from climate-sensitive process-based modelling (PBM) that reflect state-of-the-art projections of future growth trends. Combining PBM and stand information from the empirical yield tables for the region of Flanders, we found that for the period 1987-2016 stand productivity has on average increased by 13% compared to 1961-1990. Furthermore, simulations indicate that this positive growth trend is most likely to persist in the coming decades, for all considered species, climate or site conditions. Nonetheless, results showed that local site variability is equally important to consider as the in- or exclusion of the CO

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.