Resilience has risen to the forefront of public policy, but forested landscapes present a number of challenges to measuring, managing, or forecasting resilience. Forests are long-lived, subject to disturbances which cause spatial heterogeneity, and are affected by climate change, which may prevent communities from recovering to a previous state after severe or repeated disturbances. Despite the challenges, forest managers are increasingly asked to manage for resilience, considering how climate change will alter the resilience of their forests and using this information to guide their decision-making. We simulated how climate change will affect the spatial patterns of resilience to disturbance in north-central Minnesota, USA. We also examined the ability of forest management to promote resilience, simulating four different management scenarios developed by stakeholders (i.e., business as usual, maximizing economic returns, maximizing carbon sequestration and climate change adaptation). Resilience was calculated as the degree to which biomass and species composition on severely disturbed sites (>70% biomass reduction) returned to the pre-disturbance state in each raster cell in the landscape. This allowed us to analyze the spatial patterns of resilience in our landscape for each of our climate scenarios.
Results/Conclusions
Resilience was significantly lower under climate change, though there was wide variation among climate change scenarios. The climate change scenario with the greatest annual precipitation (GFDL), had the highest resilience, while the scenario with highest mean annual temperature (MIROC_ESM) had the lowest resilience. Three of the management scenarios (current practices, maximizing economic returns, maximizing carbon storage) had similar resilience. Only the climate change adaptation scenario had consistently higher resilience under climate change. In this adaptation scenario, managers managed for climate change by planting more frequently and with greater diversity than under current management and favoring species that are expected to do well under climate warming. Spatial patterns of resilience were contingent on whether lands were actively managed, but did not differ by ownership (e.g. tribal, federal, state, private). Our results demonstrate that forest resilience may be lower under climate change, and only a substantial shift in forest practices would promote resilience in central MN. When combined with visualization tools, our results can help bracket the range of possible outcomes from changes in climate and disturbance regimes, help guide future management decisions and facilitate discussions about climate change.