by Mats Mahnken

During the STSM, Mats had the chance to work with the various forest modeling experts of the group on establishing a harmonized modeling framework for projecting dynamics and ecosystem service provisioning in forest stands of the French national forest inventory (NFI). The STSM aimed at setting up a harmonized simulation protocol for simulating ecosystem service provisioning with multiple existing dynamic forest models.

Besides the setup of the simulation protocol, input data for the models were prepared and first simulations for model evaluation were implemented to assess the agreement of the model and observed ecosystem dynamics in the French NFI. Next steps include the simulation of future forest dynamics in the French NFI stands under different climate, disturbance and management scenarios as well as implementing similar multi-model simulations for the German NFI forests.

Ultimately, the simulations at the country scale will improve our knowledge about impacts on ecosystem service provisioning of European forests under climate change and disturbances and what we can do in terms of forest management. The modeling built on prior work from an ongoing collaboration between PIK and LESSEM on country scale modeling efforts.

If you are interested in doing an STSM, please find more information here.