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Chinese Journal of Applied Ecology ›› 2019, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (5): 1699-1712.doi: 10.13287/j.1001-9332.201905.011

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Effects of climate change, fire and silvicultural management on ecological resilience of typical cold-temperate forests in China.

LUO Xu1*, LIANG Yu2, HE Hong-shi3, HUANG Chao2, ZHANG Qing-long2   

  1. 1Department of Geography & Spatial Information Technology, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, Zhejiang, China;
    2Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Mangement, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China;
    3School of Geographical Science, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China
  • Received:2018-07-20 Revised:2018-07-20 Online:2019-05-15 Published:2019-05-15
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31600373, 41371199).

Abstract: Ecological resilience is characterized by the recovery capacity of forest ecosystem from a status affected by external disturbance to a stable status, which is one of the important targets for sustainable development of forests. Ecological resilience is sensitive to external factors, such as climate change, forest fire, and silvicutural management at large scales. Understanding the effects of those factors on ecological resilience is important for forest ecosystem management. In this study, we calculated ecological resilience with indicators including forest structure, composition and function. We used a landscape model LANDIS PRO to evaluate the effects of climate change, climate-induced fire, and silvicultural management on ecological resilience in boreal forests. We also evaluated whether the current thinning treatment could be implemented under the scenarios of climate change. The results showed that the initialized stand density and basal area from the year 2000 could represent the real forest landscape in year 2000, with no significant difference between the simulated landscape and the forest inventory data in the year 2010 at landscape scale. The results of simulated fire disturbance were consistent with the results from the field inventories in burned areas. The fire module parameters set adequately represented the current fire regimes in model simulation. The ecological resilience could increase by 15.7%-40.8% at landscape scale when fire intensity increased by 30%, whereas the ecological resilience decreased by 4.4%-24.6% when fire intensity increased by 200%. At the short and medium term, the effects of increased fire on forest ecological resilience were greater than that of climate change. Compared to the current base scenario, forest ecological resilience under B1 climate with fire intensity increased by 30% scenario and A2 climate with fire intensity increased by 200% scenario fluctuated in the ranges of -15.9%-38.9% and -60.4%-34.8% in the whole simulation period at landscape scale. Compared to no harvesting scenario, the current thinning strategy would decrease the ecological resilience at landscape scale under both B1 and A2 scenarios in all simulated periods. Under the scenario of B1 climate with 30% increases of fire intensity, no silvicultural management would be needed in the whole simulation period at landscape scale, whereas medium and high intensity of silvicultural management were suggested under the scenario of A2 climate with 200% increase of fire intensity.