Operational approaches to managing forests of the future in Mediterranean regions within a context of changing climates

Stephens, SL; Millar, CI; Collins, BM. 2010. Operational approaches to managing forests of the future in Mediterranean regions within a context of changing climates. ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS 5 (2): art. no.-024003.

This article gives an overview of potential restoration strategies for forests in Mediterranean regions (focus on California and Baja, Mexico ) mostly from a fire ecology perspective. Restoration in this article is treated as a suite of strategies to deal with climate change after a century of fire suppression and logging in areas that are currently forested. This article does not address the restoration of severely degraded sites or reforestation/aforestation.

The article presents the following framework of potential restoration actions:

1. Resistance options -- implementing fuels treatments to increase resistance to severe wildfires, mechanical thinning projects

2. Resilience options -- maintaining spatially heterogeneous forests, reintroducing fire in order to increase heterogeneity and overall resilience

3. Response options – facilitate transitions and species’ range shifts, management should focus on maintaining species composition at the ecoregion scale NOT the sub-regional scale, post-fire planting should use a more diverse species and genetic mix

4. Realignment options – undoing the damage of past-logging and fire suppression; their only specific example is establishing refugia and maintaining connectivity.

What I like about this article is that it attempts to get specific with potential strategies and examples which is a refreshing break from the vagueness of many climate change adaptation articles. The cons are that they don’t break a whole lot of new ground in terms of their suggested strategies, the focus is forests of California and northern Mexico, and they have a fire bias.

Photo: 2010 prescribed burn at Lassen NP, Nick Money NPS