Are future forests driven by climate or management?

Forest management activities such as harvesting of varying intensities can also be used to promote forest health and improve provisioning of use and non-use based ecosystem services. However, it is unclear how projected climate change will impact the effects of forest management on both ecosystem service provision and overall forest resilience to extreme events such as drought. Therefore, to build resilient forest landscapes for the future, a range of management strategies targeted at different priorities must be considered within the context of the response to the range of climate variability a region is projected to experience over the next century. We designed a model-based experiment using the Ecosystem Demography 2.0 model to evaluate interactions between management and climate on future forest ecosystems. Management strategies of varied in intensity and primary goal, ranging from timber production focused high removal harvests to low-intensity removals designed to improve diversity and passive management scenarios. Each management scenario was run under an ensemble of climate change projections in order to quantify how sensitive forest dynamics are to a range of future climate changes. Finally, we evaluated the corresponding provisioning of ecosystem services and forest resilience in each scenario. Chosen ecosystem services reflected the different priorities for which forests are managed and included total and rates of carbon sequestration, timber value, regulation of water cycling, and biodiversity. For all ecosystem services, we evaluated the mean performance, sensitivity to climate, and climate resilience under each management scenario.