I-MAESTRO

Innovative forest management strategies for a resilient bioeconomy under climate change and disturbances (I-MAESTRO) improves the scientific basis for developing management strategies that increase resilience for future natural disturbances and climate change, while maintaining a high level of wood production, carbon storage, and habitat quality for biodiversity Climate change will modify forest dynamics and direct (precipitation, temperature) and indirect (disturbance) effects, which will affect production and other ecosystem services such as carbon storage and biodiversity conservation ( Lindner et al., 2014 ) Disturbances can intensify in the future (Seidl et al. (2017) and fostering resilience has become a key target for forest adaptation ( Puettman et al., 2009 ) and must be thought of as a prerequisite for developing the forest bioeconomy ( Winkel 2017 ). Forest resilience will become important as societies will increase the use of forest resources. The objectives of this project are: • Analyse the impacts of disturbances, management and climate change scenarios on ecosystem services with forest models at different scales • Assess the effect of structural complexity on ecosystem services and the value of complexity-based management strategies • Provide recommendations for enhancing forest resilience through adaptive management strategies

PIK will provide forest, soil and climate data for the evaluation and calibration and use of the disposable models in I-MAESTRO. Its team supervises simulation and makes sure the required model adaptations and programming in the process-based forest model 4C. Additionally, the institute participates in elaboration of management scenarios and strategies