DIS4MA

Forests cover a third of the global land, provide vital ecosystem services, and sustain biodiversity. They play a pivotal role for climate mitigation as major carbon sinks, making them central to the EU Green Deal and international commitments under the Paris Agreement. Yet climate change and intensifying disturbance regimes threaten forest resilience. Forest management strategies aiming at enhancing resilience and adaptive capacity are therefore essential to sustain ecosystem services. A promising approach is to use natural disturbance characteristics as benchmarks for management. The Comparability Index, a quantitative tool assessing the similarity between management and disturbance regimes, shows potential to assist such management, but has only been applied at the European scale; to become operational for managers, this tool must be downscaled. DIS4MA will downscale and spatialize the Comparability Index to South Tyrol, a region in the Alps with detailed forest management plans and disturbance data. Using advanced simulation modelling, the project will assess how science-informed management affects ecosystem services under climate change and disturbance scenarios. To ensure the feasibility of the proposed management, the project will engage with local stakeholders and develop participatory management guidelines. By combining various expertise and methods, DIS4MA will help bridge the gap between science and local stakeholders, integrating their preferences with model results into resilience-based management guidelines.