Forest Management Scenarios for Adaptation and Mitigation (FORMASAM)

The Forest Management Scenarios for Adaptation and Mitigation (FORMASAM) project is funded by the European Forest Institute under EFI Network Fund and runs from 2018 to 2020. It has brought together modellers and forest management experts from all over Europe (18 partners and 9 associated partners), including eastern and south-eastern European experts.

FORMASAM is divided into 4 task groups. The first, "Future Forest Management Scenarios", designs future forest management scenarios involving national experts from the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe (UNECE) Team of Specialists. The subsequent three –"Forest management at stand-scale", "Forest management at the landscape scale" and "Forest management at the European scale"–, operationalise these scenarios for stand, landscape and continental scale models.

Read more about partners, meetings procedures and outcomes of at the FORMASAM website.

Goal

FORMASAM developed future forest management scenarios that focus on increasing forest resilience and contributing to the bioeconomy, to provide input into future forest sector outlook studies –such as the UNECE Forest Sector Outlook Study– and also support the updating of the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC) of the EU and its member states for the Paris Agreement.

These scenarios are consistent from the stand across the landscape to the continental level, allowing to explore climate mitigation and adaptation options for the European bioeconomy, and their further integration into modelling studies.

Outcomes

The PROFOUND Database

The PROFOUND database brings together data from a wide range of data sources to evaluate vegetation models and simulate climate impacts at the forest stand scale. It has been designed to allow for a thorough evaluation of complex, process-based vegetation models using multiple data streams covering a range of processes at different temporal scales; and to allow for climate impact assessments by providing the latest climate scenario data.

It provides general a site description as well as soil, climate, CO2, Nitrogen deposition, tree-level, forest stand-level and remote sensing data for 9 forest stands spread throughout Europe. Moreover, for a subset of 5 sites, also time series of carbon fluxes, energy balances and soil water are available.

Reference:

• Reyer, C. P. O., Silveyra Gonzalez, R., Dolos, K., Hartig, F., Hauf, Y., Noack, M., Lasch-Born, P., Rötzer, T., Pretzsch, H., Meesenburg, H., Fleck, S., Wagner, M., Bolte, A., Sanders, T. G. M., Kolari, P., Mäkelä, A., Vesala, T., Mammarella, I., Pumpanen, J., Collalti, A., Trotta, C., Matteucci, G., D'Andrea, E., Foltýnová, L., Krejza, J., Ibrom, A., Pilegaard, K., Loustau, D., Bonnefond, J.-M., Berbigier, P., Picart, D., Lafont, S., Dietze, M., Cameron, D., Vieno, M., Tian, H., Palacios-Orueta, A., Cicuendez, V., Recuero, L., Wiese, K., Büchner, M., Lange, S., Volkholz, J., Kim, H., Horemans, J. A., Bohn, F., Steinkamp, J., Chikalanov, A., Weedon, G. P., Sheffield, J., Babst, F., Vega del Valle, I., Suckow, F., Martel, S., Mahnken, M., Gutsch, M., and Frieler, K. (2020). The PROFOUND Database for evaluating vegetation models and simulating climate impacts on European forests, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12: 1295-1320.

The PROFOUND Database is available freely but we incite users to respect the data policies of the individual datasets as provided in the metadata of each data file:

• Freely available as a SQLite relational database or ASCII flat file version at http://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2020.006 (Reyer et al., 2020).
• Also accessible via the ProfoundData R package at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ProfoundData (Silveyra Gonzalez et al., 2020). This provides basic functions to explore, plot and extract the data for model set-up, calibration and evaluation.
  

FORMASAM contacts

• At the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
  • Christopher Reyer, Dr. rer. nat. (reyer@pik-potsdam.de)

• At the European Forest Institute (EFI)
  • Hans Verkerk: FORMASAM contact at EFI (hans.verkerk@efi.int)
  • Katriina Pajari: EFI Network Fund contact (katriina.pajari@efi.int)