REFORCE

Climate change will increase risks for the provision of forest products and services. Enhancing forest resilience thus becomes a key objective for adapting forests to climate change. To achieve this objective, researchers, policy-makers and managers must UNDERSTAND the mechanisms underlying forest resilience to climate change, and how they are influenced by forest management; ASSESS management options and their implications for ecosystem services in different European regions and under different environmental conditions; and ENHANCE the science-policy-practice interface to ensure that research results are informative for management and policy decisions. Building on prior and on-going EU projects, REFORCE addresses these problems by: - developing recommendations for operational forest resilience measures in multifunctional forestry - mapping the resilience of forest productivity to climatic events across Europe and North-East Canada with remote sensing at a variety of scales, and identifying gradients of resilience within and between regions - analysing ecological mechanisms of forest resilience that can be influenced by management on short- (e.g. thinning and drought resistance), intermediate (functional diversity and productivity) and long (demographic processes) time scales, with mechanistic and empirical models informed by monitoring data - evaluating approaches to managing resilience, including potential trade-offs between foresighted and delayed adaptation, using mechanistic forest models and economic analyses - fostering the implementation of resilience management by co-developing management alternatives with local stakeholders in different regions and by developing and applying strategies for the adequacy of communications. As a result, REFORCE will develop and evaluate regionally-adapted, climate-resilient and risk-aware management regimes for multifunctional forestry.