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Abstract
With forest-based climate mitigation increasingly cited as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, forest management tools that are used to assess and anticipate the impact of alternative management scenarios on carbon storage and sequestration, such as the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), should accurately and precisely represent forest responses to changing climate. An extension of FVS called Climate-FVS (Crookston et al. 2010) relies on estimates of climatic suitability derived from species-level environmental envelopes to modify demographic processes, such as expected tree growth. An alternative approach is to model the direct effect of climate variation on individual tree growth using the responses recorded in annual growth rings. Tree rings sampled at a broad spatial scale can be used to quantify population-level heterogeneity in average growth rate in response to average climate as well as the sensitivity of growth to interannual climate variability. Increment cores collected across the Interior West on Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots were compiled into a tree-ring data network (DeRose et al. 2017), providing a unique opportunity to use the rich information on climate effects recorded in annual growth rings, complemented by inventory data from their associated forest plots, to parameterize FVS growth models. This combination of tree-ring and forest inventory data makes it possible not only to build a climate-sensitive version of FVS, but also to look more closely at the representation of tree growth in FVS, including alternative combinations of predictors of tree growth, and how climate might interact with other drivers (e.g., competition).
Parent Publication
Keywords
forest management,
forest planning,
growth and yield,
vegetation dynamics,
habitat modeling,
carbon inventory,
landscape dynamics,
fire,
fuels,
climate change,
economics,
tree-rings
Citation
Giebink, Courtney L.; DeRose, R. Justin; Castle, Mark; Shaw, John D.; Evans, Margaret E.K. 2024. Climatic sensitivities derived from tree rings improve predictions of the Forest Vegetation Simulator. In: Shaw, John D; Battaglia, Mike A.; Castle, Mark, [comps.]. Sixth Forest Vegetation Simulator Conference; 2023 March 7-9; Fort Collins, CO. Proceedings RMRS-P-81. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. p. 28-31.
