Advancing forest management modelling for next-generation Earth system models

Managed forests occupy a large area of land, with almost 30% of the world’s forests designated primarily for production. Management can alter a forest’s carbon storage to a considerable extent, via tree species selection, planting and thinning density, selective logging, and wood harvesting. Forest management can also impact biophysical variables like canopy roughness, evapotranspiration, and surface albedo, which can produce strong effects on local warming or cooling. In addition, forest management is increasingly seen as a key component of many countries’ climate mitigation planning and a component of Net Zero targets. However, Earth System Models (ESMs) used to produce climate projections have historically contained limited functionality to represent processes relevant to forest management, meaning that the coupled-system consequences of these interventions remain underexplored. In recent years significant advances have been made to simulate forest management in dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and land surface models (LSMs), the offline land surface components of ESMs. These include adding features to represent wood harvest; options to allow users additional control over forest plantation; plant functional types (PFTs) tuned specifically to represent common tree species used in forestry; and more detailed representation of forest demography (allowing for age- or size-specific growth, harvesting and mortality). In this paper, we summarize these developments and make the case for their usage in operational ESM configurations, so that the impacts of forest management on the climate, and the importance of forest management for climate mitigation, are properly represented in next generation climate projections.

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