Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Project Now Underway
Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) is a collaborative effort to establish a series of experimental silvicultural trials across a network of different ecosystem types throughout the United States. Scientists, land managers, and partners are developing trial sites as part of a multi-region study researching long-term ecosystem responses to range of climate change adaptation actions.
The primary objectives of ASCC are to:
- Create a multi-region study with local-suited climate change adaptation treatments using input from an expert panel of regional scientist and local managers
- Introduce natural resource managers to concepts, approaches, and tools that help integrate climate change considerations into resource management and silvicultural decision making.
Study Design
Each trial serves as part of this multiregion study focused on understanding and evaluating management options designed to enable forests to respond to a changing climate. Site-specific treatments are developed according to local conditions and tailored to meet site management objectives, while aligned under a common framework for answering important questions about the response of these forest types to climate change. In using this two-tiered design, ASCC provides tangible means of evaluating adaptive management strategies across distinct forest types, allowing researchers to ask broad questions about climate change adaptation across all study sites, while addressing on-the-ground management application specific to individual sites. Adaptive planning processes guide treatment design and implementation, under three foundational climate change adaptation options, with a "no action" control.
To kick off each ASCC site, a multiday workshop is held to familiarize local managers and scientists with adaption approaches and tactics for forest management. During the workshop, an expert panel of scientist and local managers also develops the specific treatments for the experiment, which includes designing resistance, resilience and transition objectives along a spectrum or gradient of climate change accommodation.
The framework of the ASCC project provides a straightforward system and a robust, replicate and long-term study design for testing climate change adaptation strategies in forest management. It also equips managers across the country with a practical approach to incorporating a suite of adaptation actions into silvicultral planning. Each ASCC treatment unit is of is of operational scale and represents significant harvest areas at each site, adding to the value and sustainability of the research. It also fosters collaboration through the long-term partnerships between researchers and managers at both the local and national levels. In this way, the ASCC project is responding to the need for operational, tangible examples of adaptive management that can foster resilience to climate change impacts and enable ecosystems to adapt under uncertain futures.
Read benefits and impacts of the ASCC project as well as the progress and next steps... https://forestadaptation.org/ascc
