Future of Global Forests Workshop

What is the future of the world’s forests? To understand and project this we need to (1) estimate the current state of the world’s forests and forest management, (2) understand the effects of main driving forces at a regional scale, and (3) define a way to make credible projections starting from the recent global forest inventory (Pan et al. 2011) and other sources (basically global RS products). It seems relevant to consider “future” in two generally interconnected temporal stages: (1) current-2030s; (2) by end of the 21th century.

• 1.Starting point: global forest inventory: review of Pan et al. (2011) based on major features from FRA 2010 + global remote sensing data with age-class map and other characteristics
• 2.What are the main factors affecting current and future forests for the main regions of earth, and what is their effect (+ or -, and how strong)?  Are there interactions?  Impact of globalization? How are these factors changing?
• 3.Is there a model or can we devise a simple multi-model framework to project future forests and reasonably described the future carbon balance?

Workshop products:

• 1.Outline of paper and writing tasks for #1-2 above
• 2.Approach and implementation plan for #3 above

Reference

Pan, Yude, Richard A. Birdsey, Jingyun Fang, Richard Houghton, Kauppi, Pekka E.; Kurz, Werner A.; Phillips, Oliver L.; Shvidenko, Anatoly; Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Steven Pacala, Simon L. Lewis, A. David McGuire, Shilong Piao, Aapo Rautiainen, Stephen Sitch, Daniel Hayes.  2011. A large and persistent carbon sink in the world’s forests. Science. 333(6045): 988-993.

Last edited: 25 May 2013