Silvicultural recommendations in times of climate change

Climate change, and here in particular prolonged droughts, heat waves and strong storms, require new concepts for silviculture. The overall objective of this project is therefore to develop silvicultural recommendations for a climate change-adapted transition of different initial stands to forests that are adapted to the changed environmental conditions. This should create the conditions to meet both current needs and future challenges for ecosystem services and climate stability of forests during the transition to the next forest generation.

This project focuses on the interactions of overstory trees and regeneration in relation to water balance, but also considers windthrow risk in mature stands. Artificial regeneration of pedunculate oak, beech, douglas fir, and silver fir will be introduced into experimentally heterogeneously thinned beech and pine stands, as well as foothill forests, where intensive site analyses will then be conducted. The thinning of the existing stand should lead to an improvement of the water balance and thus to more favorable growing conditions for the regeneration plants. The development of the regeneration plants will be recorded as a function of soil water availability. In addition, the changing radiation and soil properties as well as the species composition and density of the vegetation will be taken into account. Using a simulation tool, wind flow conditions are also calculated. By means of an optimization procedure, this information is finally used to derive the best possible water supply for regeneration plants while minimizing the windthrow risk to mature stands. As a result, the optimization procedure provides stem distribution plans for sample stands that can be considered optimal in the course of silvicultural transfer.