Predicting the combined impacts of climate change and selective logging in timber production forests of Central Africa. [P-2215-03]

In the design and the implementation of current rules of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM), still too little account is taken of the sensitivity of tropical forests to climate change. In the Congo Basin, forests cover 220 million hectares and represent an economic sector of utmost importance for the rural development as well as for national and regional climate strategies. Hence, these forests constitute a major challenge for both adaptation and mitigation. A prerequisite to ensure the relevance and the effectiveness of SFM recommendations in this region is to elucidate the influence on forest dynamics of both climate change and harvesting pressure. This influence will likely consist of major shifts in structure and floristic composition. By opening the stands and increasing light availability, selective logging fosters the development of light demanding species. Some of these species, particularly the pioneers, are thought to be particularly drought sensitive so that global warming could strongly impact logged forests. The study of forest-climate-logging relationships needs therefore species-level predictions. However, the high diversity of tropical forests, in pair with the scarcity of data, hinders the correct fitting of species-specific models. To investigate the combined effects of climate and harvesting influence on Central African forests, we conducted long-term simulations of forest dynamics under several scenarios of climate change and timber harvesting. Climate scenarios were based on outputs from simulations of the atmospheric model ARPEGE-Climate of the French National Centre for Meteorological Research (CNRM), performed within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) and under several Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We also used outputs fields such as soil water and potential evapotranspiration from the model CARbon Assimilation In the Biosphere (CARAIB) of University of Liège obtained under the same climatic scenarios. Logging scenarios were implemented by considering a wide range of felling intensities. To carry out this work, we developed an innovative method based on a Mixture of inhomogeneous matrix models (MIMM) that permits to test and simulate the influence of timber harvesting and climate change on forest dynamics. While insuring a satisfactory fitting of vital parameters, such a methodology allowed us to reflect the diversity of tree ecological patterns, notably in response to climate variables. To do this, we simultaneously clustered species into groups according to species-specific ecological responses and identified group-specific explicative environmental and climate variables. To infer and validate model outputs, we used the M'Baïki site, in the Central African Republic (CAR), a unique experimental site that has been monitored for 30 years through a collaborative partnership with various French and CAR institutional and research organizations. (Texte intégral)

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Claeys, Florian, Mortier, Frédéric, Ouédraogo, Dakis-Yaoba, François, Louis, Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie, Hérault, Bruno, Gaspard, Romain, Fayolle, Adeline, Picard, Nicolas
Format:	conference_item biblioteca
Language:	eng
Published:	CFCC15
Subjects:	K10 - Production forestière, P40 - Météorologie et climatologie,
Online Access:	http://agritrop.cirad.fr/577037/ http://agritrop.cirad.fr/577037/1/ID577037.pdf
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!