Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The forested area in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) region encompasses a highly varied landscape that includes the full range of ecosystem productivity in North America. To sustainability manage forest resources in this region, managers require improved estimates of growth (measured as site index, or maximum potential growth) over those currently available. Furthermore, climate is a key determinant of growth, and given recent global and regional warming trends, new predictive ecosystem models and climate-informed strategies to understand and manage forest growth are required. The availability of canopy condition attained from satellite, in combination with temporally and spatially explicit climate data, have the potential to advance how we stratify and establish forest inventories, determine harvest levels, and monitor the response of ecosystems to changing environments. Our research will involve the application of a physiological forest growth model to generate region-wide maps of the maximum potential growth for a suite of widely distributed species in the PNW. By using state-of-the-art estimates of historical, current and future climate, enhanced for use in coastal mountainous environments, we believe that these predictions will be the best available due to the increased resolution of the input data. The predictions will then be constrained by satellite canopy density data, and verified using field observations. These predictions of potential and actual productivity will allow the further investigation of landscape scale plant-climate relationships and provide three critical deliverables: an analysis of the predicted genetic variation among tree populations, to better govern species and seed source selection for regeneration; quantify differences between growth as predicted using an ecosystem-based approach with those derived from conventional methods for verification of annual allowable cut estimations; and thirdly, to better understand the effect of climate variability on predictions of carbon fluxes from the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3).