Data: Optimizing sustainable and multifunctional management of Alpine Forests under climate change (Q10452)

The repository contains the data supporting the findings of the study: Optimizing sustainable and multifunctional management of Alpine Forests under climate change Abstract: Climate change challenges the sustainable provision of biodiversity and ecosystem services in Alpine forests, including the important protection service against gravitational hazards. Forest planners are faced with the question how to adapt and manage best their forests to guarantee future forest multifunctionality. Usually, planners have alternative close-to-nature management approaches at hand, but individual management objectives and forest resilience affects the optimal management portfolio. We used the climate sensitive forest growth model ForClim and multi-objective optimization to address this planning task using an Alpine forest enterprise in Switzerland as case study site. We present an optimization framework tailored for the important protective service of mountain forests, allowing for the integration of flexible and multiple management objectives. Our results showed that an optimized management can safeguard and improve provision of multiple benefits at the same time with the optimal management portfolio depending on the targeted objectives. Impacts of climate change require however increasing shares of climate adapted close-to-nature management strategy reaching 78\% in forests without protection service and 68\% in forests with protection service, while the latter were more sensitive to climate change impacts. Climate adapted close-to-nature management strategy in combination with less intensive strategies and reserve areas provided the highest multifunctionality under the most intense climate change scenario. Adaptation also allowed for further improvement of biodiversity and ecosystem service provision, particularly for carbon sequestration. In conclusion, forest planning should rely and make use of climate sensitive modelling and optimization frameworks to adapt forests against uncertainties of climate change and for future sustainability and multifunctionality. Data: There is one folder containing the input data for the multi-objective optimization and one folder containing the optimization output. The input represents the periodically (10 years time steps) simulated biodiversity and ecosystem service indicators for each forest stand in the case study area under alternative management and climate change scenarios. The optimization output includes 18 iterations for three climate scenarios (Hist, SSP2-4.5, SSP5-8.5), three optimization scenarios (Timber, Multifunctionality, Enterprise) and for forests with and without protective service. This study was conducted as part of the ONEforest project, which received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement N 101000406.