Water stress in Swedish forests: identifying risk areas to target management action (WiSdoM)

Sweden’s forests are increasingly exposed to extreme heat and drought, causing periods of water stress.

This trend is expected to intensify in the coming decades, with the risk of serious negative impacts on the forest-based sector, forest ecosystem services and climate change mitigation efforts. Yet management interventions can help alleviate these stresses or limit their impacts.

To apply these interventions effectively, high quality intelligence is needed on which areas of forest are most likely to be at risk and when, to enable targeted, cost-efficient actions.

This project will combine and further develop existing technologies to create a system that will provide such intelligence.

At the core will be a widely-used process-based forest ecosystem model, which has recently been updated with a state-of-the-art representation of tree water stress responses. We will work with industry and regulatory stakeholders to customise the model setup and outputs to their needs.

Concurrently, we will develop an unprecedented observational dataset of water stress impacts on Swedish forests and use it to parameterise and evaluate the model for the Swedish context.

In doing so, we will transition this model to a tool that can be applied operationally to assess forest water-stress vulnerability in Sweden.

Working with the stakeholder team we will use this tool to co-create and disseminate current and future vulnerability maps and management proposals for Sweden’s production forest.