Regionalisation of climate change sensitive forest development types for potential afforestation areas

Abstract

This paper describes how to use sectoral planning information from forestry to predict and up-scale information on Climate Change sensitive forest development types for potential afforestation areas. The method was developed and applied in the frame of the project RegioPower with focus on the case study region 'Oberes Elbtal-Osterzgebirge'. The data for our study was taken from forest management planning at level of the Federal State of Saxony, Germany. Here, a silvicultural system is implemented, which describes best practices to develop our actual forests into Climate Change adapted forest development types. That includes the selection of drought resistant tree species, a broad range of tree species mixtures per eligible forest development type and the tending, harvesting and regeneration strategies to be applied. This information however, exists only for forest areas and not for areas which could be potentially afforested. The eligibility of the forest development types within the actual forest areas depends on site information, such as nutrient potential, exposition and hydrological soil parameters. The regionalisation of the forest development types to landscape scale had to be based on topographical parameters from the digital elevation model and hydrological soil parameters from soil mapping. In result, we could provide maps for regional planning and decision making with spatially explicit information on the eligible forest development types based on forest management planning information. These maps form a valuable input for testing and optimising afforestation areas with regard to improving the ability of our case study region to mitigate Climate Change effects such as water erosion or drought.

Keywords: Climate Change; Forest development types; Forest management planning; GISCAME; Potential afforestation areas; Regionalisation.