The project “Advanced multifunctional forest management in European mountain RANGEs” (ARANGE) will evaluate the capacity of current forest management regimes and possible alternative future management to provide portfolios of ecosystem services (ES) from mountain forests. The project includes a wide range of forest types in the major European mountain ranges and seeks to develop and evaluate strategies for their multifunctional management under risk and uncertainty due to changing climate and socio-economic conditions.
To analyse conflicts and complementarities among ES from stand to landscape scale, improved models for the assessment and projection of ES as well as novel planning and decision support tools will be developed together with SMEs and applied to regional case studies as informed by decision makers and other stakeholders in the study regions.
The overall aims of ARANGE are
- to investigate the potentials and limitations of current and possible future approaches to mountain forest management for providing portfolios of ES under current and future climatic and socio-economic conditions
- to identify related risks and uncertainties
- to translate the scientific state of knowledge about the efficient provision of multiple ES from mountain forests into decision support for policy makers and forest practitioners, so as to improve the robustness of planning tools in real-world decision making.
The project addresses four main ES:
- timber production
- protection against gravitational natural hazards
- the role of forests in climate change mitigation via carbon sequestration as well as bioenergy production, and
- nature conservation and the maintenance of biodiversity
Non-timber forest products, landscape aesthetics for recreation as well as use of forested landscapes by game and livestock species will be dealt with as well, although not throughout the project.
In ARANGE, state-of-the-art models of forest dynamics at stand and landscape scales will be used. The development focus of the project will be on (i) the quantitative assessment of a range of ES, and (ii) in planning and decision support tools and approaches.
