Enhancing the resilience of European forests – from concept to forest management application

Resilience is one of the current buzzwords that is seen as a solution for various problems related to global change. In the field of ecology, the discussion on resilience started most notably with the work of C.S. Holling in 1973. Since then, the resilience perspective is used in various fields, from anthropology to economy (Folke, 2006). Due to the popularity of the term, the meaning of resilience has become ambiguous and this in turn has made effective operationalization of the term difficult (Brand and Jax, 2007). Forest managers are asked to apply the resilience concept in their work, but without concrete guidelines on how and what to manage and how to measure success of the methods, the concept is not useful for them (Angeler and Allen, 2016). In a narrow perspective, forests are ecosystems that are affected by climate change and disturbances. At the same time, they are also part of complex social-ecological systems that are managed to serve multiple needs of society. Forests provide a multitude of ecosystem services to society: recreation, wood products, non-wood forest products, habitats for biodiversity, fresh water etc. However, they are also increasingly affected by different disturbances, which can endanger the provision of the crucial services. Disturbances are part of natural cycles in forests, but climate change can change these disturbance regimes in unprecedented way, which can lead to significant decrease in forest resilience or even cause wide-spread mortality of the forest. For example, fire regimes react very quickly to climate and weather and can act as a catalyst in climate change induced vegetation change (Flannigan, Stocks, & Wotton, 2000). Even though forests are naturally resilient (Thompson et al., 2009), the increased stressors can be too much for the forests to cope with. The resilience of forests to face these disturbances and climate change should therefore be enhanced. There is increasingly more research on how to make resilience quantifiable in forest management (e.g. Allen et al. 2016; Cantarello et al. 2017; Newton and Cantarello, 2015), but most of it focuses solely on the ecological resilience of forests and does not consider the social aspects or how resilience can be quantified in forest related human communities. In addition, due to the difficulties of having one, all-encompassing definition for resilience, more and more researchers have decided to choose the definition or a group of definitions that are the most appropriate to their research. This is especially relevant in the area of research, where the concept of resilience is aimed to be quantifiable. Seidl et al. (2016) consider ecological, engineering and socio-ecological resilience of a forest ecosystem separately, whereas Newton and Cantarello (2015) suggest that managers should choose the definition that best fits the management goals. Instead of quantifying resilience, Allen et al. (2016) quantify spatial resilience. While this approach can make quantifying certain aspects of overall resilience easier there is a risk that this leads to a too narrow and simplistic view on resilience and how to manage it. In my dissertation I aim to bridge this gap between the resilience science and practice. I aim at establishing a resilience definition that is both suitable for forest-related social-ecological systems and operational for forest managers and policy makers to use. In addition, I aim at developing clear indicators for forest resilience as well as a decision support framework that helps the forest managers to assess forest resilience based on the developed indicators and other decision support tools.