Alpine Resilience Web Atlas: New open-source platform features maps of forest disturbance, field stories, living labs and future hotspots

When you are on a road below a steep Alpine slope and you see the trees above you, these trees are not only a part of magestic scenery. They serve nature's resilience: a forest on a slope holds back snow before it becomes an avalanche, catches boulders before they reach the switchback, slows the water that would otherwise arrive in the valley all at once. Foresters call these protective forests, and across the Alps they stand between the region's residents and the mountain serving as a shield for roads, railways, villages, and towns.

Under changing climate conditions that shield is being tested. Windstorms are felling stands that stood for a century. Bark beetles are finishing what the wind starts. Fires are burning at elevations and in months where fire was once a marginal concern. And these hazards increasingly arrive together, or in sequence – what researchers call compound and cascading events. A slope stripped by fire is a future rockfall problem.

Today the EU-funded MOSAIC project publishes the Alpine Resilience Web Atlas, a free web platform that assembles the knowledge about forests from twelve European research institutions, including IIASA, from six countries – Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Italy, France, and Germany. The platform features maps, models, datasets, the field experiments, and the stories, told so that anyone can follow them.

What the Atlas does

Every map in the Atlas is a real geographic information system in a browser window, not a picture of one. Users can switch basemaps, toggle layers, adjust layer opacity, click a feature to read its attributes, right-click to copy coordinates, upload their own shapefile as a zip to overlay on the analysis, and download the underlying layer as a shapefile to take into their own GIS.

Stories currently host 23 illustrated long-form articles about a real place and a real event, each with its own interactive map embedded in the text. Readers can filter stories by eight categories: Avalanche, Bark Beetle, Communication, Models, Rockfall, Tools, Wildfire and Windstorm. A “Surprise me” button picks one at random.

Forest Living Labs is an interactive map of field sites across Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and France. Each site opens a card listing its main hazards, its actual management problem, a photograph, and a downloadable fact sheet. A Catalogue “Protective Forest Management in the Alps: An Illustrated Guide” draws together results from all of the project's components and from the network of the Forest Living Labs featuring the aggregated results for measures behind resilient Alpine protective forests. It is downloadable in English, French, German, Italian and Slovenian.

Hotspot Maps is a screening of Alpine tree species that demonstrates where vulnerable species and rising fire risk share the same ground. A collection of curated Datasets and Models is available, too. In addition, the web site features a term glossary, defining the vocabulary that usually divides the communities, so that the project speaks the common language.

Hotspot maps

Maps that combine and mix several data sources help see where the fire risk meets the tree species and where the compound vulnerability really is. The Hotspot maps prepared by INRAE , ONF, and IIASA, which provided cross FLAM fire projections under climate change with a 1 km grid of presence probability for all 28 species, clipped to Copernicus forest cover so that every hotspot is a real stand. A slope where fire risk climbs steeply is no priority if the trees on it can cope, and a milder rise matters if they cannot.