Integrating risks of severe drought and fire into management of Swedish production forests (RISK-DF)

Swedish forestry will likely experience profound, region-specific and temporally complex impacts of climatic extremes.

Although these risks to wood production are well known, the current forest management does not explicitly consider them during decision making that can potentially compromise long-term sustainability of Swedish forest industry.

The proposed project will contribute towards developing of proactive risk management programs in Swedish forestry, focusing on two connected disturbance agents: drought and forest fires.

Risks-DF will model risks associated with drought and fire in Swedish production forests and will integrate these two factors into HEUREKA, an existing decision support system guiding management decisions in the majority of Swedish forest companies.

The project will achieve this goal through identification of relevant climate extremes leading to increased risks of drought-induced declines in biomass productivity and that of forest fires.

The project will encompass empirical studies to identify weather states causing growth declines and increased fire risk.

We will conduct attribution analysis to model future frequency and severity of relevant (i.e. empirically-identified) climate thresholds weather states.

We will rely on Sweden-wide datasets of forest growth, complimented with newly collected data to realistically project risks of drought-related productivity declines and fire upon managed landscapes.