Document Details

Title
Development and analysis of forest health databases, models, and economic impacts for BC: Spruce bark beetle & spruce; western spruce budworm and Douglas fir
Author
Murdock, Trevor Q.
Date
2009
Abstract
The purpose of this project is to develop standard climate spatial databases and climate change projection databases, compatible with the scale of recently developed natural disturbance databases and data on host distribution from forest inventory records, and to use these data to develop and test methods to predict the impacts of climate change on forest pests, using the western spruce budworm/Douglas-fir (WSBW/DF) and spruce bark beetle/spruce (SBB/S) systems as test cases. Preliminary modeling analyses have been done of climate change impacts on biogeoclimatic zones, trees species ranges and climatic parameters (Hamann and Wang 2006, Wang et al 2006, Spittlehouse 2006, http://www.pacificclimate.org/impacts/rbcmuseum/index.cgi?harvest). All show the potential for rapid widespread changes in forest ecosystems within the next rotation. Though none of these forecasts look at forest pests directly, they indicate major stress for forests trees associated with significant change in environmental factors controlling forest pests. Assessing the future of BCs forests under the forcing of climate change is a complex task because of the pest-host interactions involved in forest health, the uncertainty and scale of results from climate models and the lack of knowledge of climate requirements of both hosts and pests. This project focuses on compiling and developing appropriate climate data and output from climate models for investigating the future of forest health and testing the data with two host-pest systems. The deliverables are a tested and relatively standard methodology of analysis, a comprehensive updatable climate data base for forecasting forest health for wide range of possible climates, and specific map-based forecasts for the two specific forest health cases (WSBW/DF and SBB/S) This year the project will aggregate the results of physical envelope modeling for climate suitability in order to produce projections of future outbreak scenarios, as well as disseminate these results. The project started by compiling empirical data about the potential impact of WSBW/SBB in reducing recoverable timber across BC. Specifically, the climatic conditions such as variations of 30-year averages of monthly minimum and maximum temperatures and precipitation for both occurrence and outbreaks of WSBW/SBB have been defined by analysis of geographic occurrence data and climate data. It is in this step that SBB entymological expertise of Alfaro, Nealis, and Taylor has been incorporated. Several choices of dataset and method for determining envelopes were investigated in the previous two years. Now that methods have been examined, it is proposed during the final year to focus on producing results from these methods for decision-making. ClimateBC and similar methods will be used to create future projected distributions of WSBW and SBB outbreaks for the next century as in Hamann and Wang (2005, 2006) and Wang et al. (2006). An estimate of the degree of climate stress on spruce and Douglas fir will be developed using forest inventory and growth and yield data. By combining future tree health and distributions with WSBW/SBB outbreak conditions, potential outbreak impacts will be projected under future climatic conditions (for the time periods of the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s) resulting in a series of high-resolution maps. The final task will be to understand what those impacts may mean for resource management decisions. WSBW/SBB outbreaks may affect forest landscape values (scenic amenities, carbon flux, wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities), fire regimes, and available options for managing forests on a large scale for decades to come. In order to understand how a landscape should be managed during a period of projected stand-level losses, it is necessary to have some knowledge of its total economic value (TEV) and how that value changes as a result of
Report Number
 
Title
View
Final report
Summary Report - Forest pests and Climate change symposium
Forrex vol10_no3_art13
Forrex vol9_no3_art2

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