Towards rigorous, non-stationary permanence risk maps from climate-sensitive disturbances to guide forest planning

Abstract:

Forests have enormous potential to provide natural climate solutions with manifold ecological, economic, and societal co-benefits. Yet the risks of forest carbon reversal, including due to climate-induced disturbances such as drought and fire, are not well quantified. Crucially, these risks are not stationary – many of them are increasing in a rapidly warming climate. A rigorous, mechanistic, and probabilistic assessment of both the potential for and the risks facing forests as natural climate solutions is urgently needed for forest planning in California and globally, bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration estimates, and forest, timber, and conservation investment efforts. We describe here an ongoing effort to quantify and map the climate-sensitive permanence risks of fire, drought, and biotic agent disturbance for US forests for historical and future climates. This work leverages long-term satellite records, forest inventory and analysis plot data, and downscaled CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate data to generate probabilistic assessments of risks that forests face in different regions of the US in a changing climate.