DIS4MA · Leveraging natural disturbance regimes to inform resilience-based forest management

Forests cover a third of the global land, provide vital ecosystem services, and sustain biodiversity. They play a pivotal role for climate mitigation as major carbon sinks, making them central to the EU Green Deal and international commitments under the Paris Agreement. Yet climate change and intensifying disturbance regimes threaten forest resilience. Forest management strategies aiming at enhancing resilience and adaptive capacity are therefore essential to sustain ecosystem services. A promising approach is to use natural disturbance characteristics as benchmarks for management. The Comparability Index (CI), a quantitative tool assessing the similarity between management and disturbance regimes, shows potential to assist such management, but has only been applied at the European scale; to become operational for managers, this tool must be downscaled. DIS4MA will downscale and spatialize CI to South Tyrol, a region in the Alps with detailed forest management plans and disturbance data. Using advanced simulation modelling, I will assess how CI-informed management affects ecosystem services under climate change and disturbance scenarios. To ensure the feasibility of the proposed management, I will engage with local stakeholders and develop participatory management guidelines. My expertise in disturbance ecology and management, combined with my supervisor’s strength in landscape modelling, represent a strong complementarity. South Tyrol’s data-rich context and EURAC’s interdisciplinary expertise in earth observation and stakeholder engagement make it the ideal setting. DIS4MA will boost my academic career, by broadening my skills and network, and benefit society by promoting resilient forests that secure ecosystem services and reduce disturbance-related costs. By combining various expertise and methods, DIS4MA will help bridge the gap between science and local stakeholders, integrating their preferences with model results into resilience-based management guidelines.