Reducing Trade-Offs in Forest Management under Climate Change

Dear Colleagues,

Forests are declining in many parts of the world due to an increase in stress from drought, diseases, wildfire, storms, floods, urbanization, and land-use changes, among others. Trees are not only dying off in their natural habitats, such as forests, but they are also declining in artificial habitats such as in urban and peri-urban ecosystems.

In forests outside urban areas, foresters, forest owners, and other stakeholders want to enhance the resilience of the current and future forests. At the same time, they want to maintain all other ecosystem services from forests as much as possible. However, a significant trade-off may exist if forest management objectives are not compatible with each other. For instance, having a high number of species in forests, which is desirable to increase ecological resilience, may not always be compatible with biomass production and other ecosystem services. Such trade-offs can be reduced by selecting proper forest management practices (e.g., species composition, thinning regimes, rotation length). Nevertheless, a general trend will be difficult to find, and outcomes of forest management modifications on trade-off reduction would vary between ecosystems, climatic regions, and sociocultural and socioeconomic conditions. Trade-offs may also vary with time as forests pass through different stages of stand development. There is still a lack of studies on the understanding of the patterns, processes, and trends in trade-offs between management objectives and their relations to forest management interventions. 

In urban and peri-urban forests, the challenges to keeping a healthy and functioning forest are more than those for forests in rural areas. Urban are warmer than rural areas, and they are prone to diseases and urbanization. Climate change impacts, such as heatwaves and drought, can be more severe in urban than in rural areas due to high impervious cover, pollution, high density of human population, commercial, and industrial activities. The situation of trade-offs may also arise in urban tree and forest management. For instance, urban tree species are often selected for their aesthetic values and multiple other ecosystem services, such as potentials for cooling urban climate, pollution reduction, noise reduction, habitat provision, erosion control, and many others. Urban tree species should also have high resiliency to drought, diseases, and heatwaves. These requirements for multiple ecosystem services can result in trade-offs. However, studies on trade-off assessments and the relationship between trade-offs, arboricultural, and silvicultural practices are still not adequate in urban and peri-urban forests.

In this issue, we aim to welcome contributions to trade-off assessments in forest management objectives from all over the world. We will be interested to see how proper interventions can reduce trade-offs in natural forests as well as built ecosystems. The scope includes (but is not limited to):

• Theoretical, mathematical, and philosophical underpinnings to trade-off assessments;
• Literature review (including systematic reviews) on trade-offs in multifunctional forest management;
• Basic and applied research on understanding the processes, patterns of trade-offs between ecosystem services, and relating them to forest management interventions;
• Empirical and process-based modeling studies on trade-offs between management objectives and their developments;
• Sociocultural, socioeconomic, socioecological, and sociotechnological studies on trade-off assessment;
• Influence of technological innovations and digitalization in trade-off reduction in forest management planning and decision process;
• Spatiotemporal studies on trade-off assessment.

Dr. Somidh Saha
Guest Editor

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• trade-off
• resilience
• sustainable forest management
• forest management planning
• climate change impacts