I-MAESTRO

I-MAESTRO improves the scientific basis for developing management strategies that increase resilience for future natural disturbances and climate change, while maintaining a high level of wood production, carbon storage, and habitat quality for biodiversity.  

Climate change will modify forest structure and dynamics through direct (precipitation, temperature) and indirect (disturbance) effects, which will affect wood production and other ecosystem services such as carbon storage and biodiversity conservation. In some areas, modelling studies predict high losses of ecosystem services , especially for provisioning and regulating services. Disturbances are key factors as they could intensify in the future. For example, increases in the frequency of drought and windstorm events as well as pest induced damages are expected that also interact in intriguing ways with ongoing climate change. Such disturbances can modulate the effects of climate change on essential ecosystem functions such as productivity. Fostering resilience has become a key target for forest adaptation and must be thought of as a prerequisite for developing the forest bioeconomy. Forest resilience will become critical as societies will increase the use of forest resources. This can play a major role in limiting degradation of the forest and associated ecosystem services.

We believe that management strategies that foster structural complexity hold strong potential for developing resilient forests, which warrants thorough reviews and in-depth analyses. I-Maestro has the following objectives:

1. Improve knowledge about resistance to disturbances and recovery processes in forest ecosystems.
2. Update a disturbance database to produce forest disturbance scenarios over Europe.
3. Analyse the impacts of disturbances, management and climate change scenarios on ecosystem services with forest models at different scales [see below].
4. Assess the effect of structural complexity on ecosystem services and the value of complexity-based management strategies.
5. Provide recommendations for enhancing forest resilience through adaptive management strategies.

EFI will update the EFI database on European disturbances and develop disturbance scenarios for forest simulation models. Trends in disturbances will be analysed to explore possible temporal dynamics in case study regions. A review of impacts of forest management changes on forest disturbance risk mitigation will be carried out. Key messages from the I-Maestro analysis will be synthesized to develop recommendations for stakeholders and policy makers. EFI supports the project communication and dissemination of project outputs.

Project I-MAESTRO is supported under the umbrella of ERA-NET Cofund ForestValue. ForestValue has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N° 773324.