Project Details
Projekt
Managing for beta-diversity to increase landscape-scale resilience of ecosystem services and economic outcomes
Subject Area
Forestry
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 459717468
Climate change and the growing impact of disturbance events on forests call for management strategies that secure both ecosystem services and economic benefits on which society depends. This project investigates the largely unexplored role of structural beta-diversity in enhancing ecological resilience to natural disturbances at the landscape level and its implications for the performance, stability, and resilience of ecosystem services and economic outcomes. Building on the BETA-FOR experiment, the project expands the scope in two key ways. First, it scales up treatments designed to enhance forest structural beta-complexity (ESBC) in space and time, by applying next-generation simulation modeling to larger forest management units (thousands of hectares) and across long-term planning horizons (decades to centuries). Second, it extends the analysis of ESBC effects to outcomes of direct relevance for forest owners and society, explicitly assessing impacts on ecosystem service provision and economic returns while accounting for decision-makers’ varying time and risk preferences. As key innovations, the project combines process-based simulation (iLand) of forest dynamics with risk-sensitive economic modeling, advancing new integrative measures of performance, stability, and resilience of ecosystem services and economic outcomes from stand to forest landscape scales. This modelling framework enables the creation of counterfactual forest trajectories under different disturbance regimes and arrangements of ESBC treatments in time and space, which are subsequently used to scrutinize the effect of beta-diversity on ecosystem service supply and economic outcomes. This will bring about a better understanding of the link between beta-diversity, ecological resilience, and the provisioning of high and stable levels of ecosystem services and economic outcomes. Finally, these links will be integrated into forest-enterprise level Pareto analyses of ESBC allocations to investigate economically efficient spatial and temporal arrangements of ESBC to enhance ecological and economic resilience and mitigate potential trade-offs between the provision of (non-marketable) ecosystem services and wood-based economic benefits for a forest enterprise. In doing so, the project makes a critical contribution to bridging the fundamental ecological advances made in BETA-FOR with the spatio-temporal scales relevant for forest management, thereby quantifying the potential of beta diversity in contributing to current challenges in forest policy and management.
DFG Programme
Research Units
