Forest Resilience

Runtime: 12/2024 - 11/2025
Team: Dr. Daniel Doktor

Undisturbed forest, with its stabilising core elements such as natural forest communities in diverse mixtures, structural diversity and complexity across all forest development phases on intact forest soils, and ongoing largely natural regeneration, is best suited to ensure the long-term resistance and resilience of forests. This is achievable in combination with an adapted, nature-oriented form of management. The functionality of these essential forest ecosystem services depends on intact forest ecosystem functions, including optimal cooling, consistent nutrient storage, photosynthesis, and high biodiversity. The stabilising core elements of undisturbed forests are at the same time key components of forest ecosystem functions.

The project focuses on assessing forest resilience, which is critical for evaluating its resistance and regeneration capacity. Forest resilience is influenced by a multitude of factors, some of which can be affected by human activity. Factors such as forest management practices, old and deadwood reserves, tree species composition, structural richness, biodiversity, and others are not the primary subject of our investigation. Instead, the study emphasis    es assessing the effects of measures taken by forest owners on forest resilience.

Satellite-based measurements of cooling (forest interior and exterior climate functions), photosynthesis (oxygen production, filtering functions, vitality, and system stability), biodiversity (structural diversity, species diversity, vitality, and system stability), and nutrient storage (biomass accumulation as a CO2 sink function) provide spatial insights into the effects of forest management on resilience and resilience development. By comparing operational forest resilience indices with average values from comparable natural and vegetation-effective evaluation zones, an annual assessment of operational resilience development can be derived and, if necessary, rewarded. Potential Natural Vegetation (PNV) areas, which are uniformly assessed nationwide and even across Europe, are suitable as evaluation zones.