Forest Biodiversity
Understanding the different aspects of how forest management can affect our natural environment in the changing climate.
In a nutshell
- Climate change and forest management practices are reshaping biodiversity in boreal forests, impacting ecosystems and species survival.
- The Forest Biodiversity Use Case combines forest growth simulations, climate projections, and bird observation data to forecast habitat suitability for 137 bird species across Finland.
- By supporting biodiversity conservation and informed forest management, it contributes to EU environmental policies and long-term ecosystem resilience.
Technical Overview
Challenge
World’s forests have gained attention due to their ability to store carbon released to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. At the same time, they are reservoirs of life and biological richness. To understand how these interconnected forest functions behave in the future under different climate scenarios and forest management conditions, we need to to be able to predict the preferred habitats of different forest species, and how forests grow and develop in terms of their biomass and habitat features. This is well aligned with the goals of Destination Earth (DestinE), the forecasts provided by the Climate DT modeling system and other data available on the Earth system in the DestinE Data Lake (DEDL). The use case needs to be demonstrated on a large geographic and temporal scale. At the same time, to account for realistic forest development scenarios at the forest stand, compartment, or sub-compartment level, the data needs to be simulated at a very high spatial resolution.
DestinE Solution
In the Forest Biodiversity project, we demonstrated a use case of the DEDL near-data processing capacity to predict the temporal trajectories of boreal forest biodiversity and carbon stock for whole Finland spanning the boreal forest zone from south to north. We first parameterized a model predicting the presence of different bird species using weather and forest structural data, then implemented a physically based forest growth and productivity model based on future climate forecasts, used climate predictions to map the suitability of future forests as habitats for different bird species, and finally provided visualization tools for studying the results on the DEDL infrastructure. The project, led by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland with the University of Jyväskylä (JyU) as a subcontractor, covers forest growth simulations over a 40-year period and 137 bird species.
The solution is a demonstrator based on data that will be available on DEDL by the end of the decade. In anticipation of long-term climate predictions by the Climate DT, we used CMIP6 climate simulations. Also, research on integrating detailed forest data into the Destine Digital Twin Earth is still ongoing, hence the latest publicly available forest parameter map was taken from the publicly available Finnish national multisource forest inventory.
Impact
The Forest Biodiversity use case will allow us to understand the different aspects of how forest management can affect our natural environment in the changing climate. It demonstrated a system that will provide the temporal trajectories of forest ecosystems under in terms of their carbon stock and suitability as wildlife habitats. Therefore, the project paved the way for improved forest management by providing high-resolution and high-precision predictions that enable forest managers to make informed decisions at the spatial resolutions relevant to them and allowing effective management practices while also preserving wildlife habitats. The tools demonstrated in the project give an explicit geographical distribution of forests as bird sanctuaries which can be aggregated to obtain information on different administrative levels and support more informed policymaking. It can also help bird enthusiasts and other members of the general public in understanding the forests in their home area, district or the whole country.
The project showcased a promising tool for developing strategies to protect and enhance biodiversity in boreal forests. It is a demonstrator combining two modeling systems: forest growth and bird species richness. In the future, additional models and data sources can be included to provide insight into more diverse forest characteristics or improve the performance of the biodiversity modeling by using additional data sources, e.g. related to land management or human activity. The project opened up the capabilities of the Destination Earth (DestinE) Data Lake services, demonstrating how they can be used for multi-purpose large-scale environmental monitoring and modeling.
Contributions
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