Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo

Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTFC) | CTFC · Landscape Dynamics and Biodiversity programme

Canopy fuels and surface fuel models, topographic features and other canopy attributes such as stand height and canopy cover, provide the necessary spatial datasets required by various fire behaviour modelling simulators. This is a technical note reporting on a pan-European fuel map server, highlighting the methods for the production and validation...

Adopting a multi-criteria approach in forest management is essential for preserving or improving specific benefits while minimizing negative environmental impacts. Determining the appropriate long-term management approach for a forest requires considering heterogeneous environmental and social factors, as well as changes in forest characteristics o...

Fire recurrence is a common phenomenon in Mediterranean forests that interrupts secondary ecosystem successions , hinders regeneration processes, and delays forests from reaching mature stages. To understand the occurrence of successive fires, we investigate the linkages between post-fire vegetation development and subsequent fire events in Eastern...

Mixed forests play a fundamental ecological role increasing biodiversity and providing ecosystem services; it has been suggested they have higher resilience and resistance against disturbances, particularly fire. Here, we compare tree mortality in post-fire mixed and pure stands in Spain, on 2,782 plots and 30,239 trees during the period 1986 to 20...

Process-based forest models combine biological, physical, and chemical process understanding to simulate forest dynamics as an emergent property of the system. As such, they are valuable tools to investigate the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems. Specifically, they allow testing of hypotheses regarding long-term ecosystem dynamics and...

Adopting a multi-criteria approach in forest management is essential for maintaining or improving specific benefits while minimizing negative environmental impacts. Determining the appropriate long-term management approach for a forest requires considering heterogeneous environmental and social factors, as well as over-time changes in forest charac...

Different interpretations of the fire regime concept have limited the capacity to allocate specific fire regimes worldwide. To solve this limitation, in this study, we present a framework to frame contemporary fire regimes spatially on a global scale. We process historical wildfire records between 2000 and 2018 across the six continents. We uncover...

In this study, we evaluated alternative methods for comparing the provision of ecosystem services among urban areas, stressing how the choice of comparison method affects the ability to compare the ecosystem service outcomes, in order to improve the management actions in urban green areas, reduce environmental inequality, and ensure satisfactory le...

The use of fire simulation tools has become a regular feature of support systems for fuel management decisions at landscape level. Considering the spatial nature of fire in the evaluation of risk and the definition of fire mitigation goals is an ongoing research topic in forest management planning. By combining a fire simulation tool, a growth and...

Los incendios juegan un papel clave en los bosques Mediterráneos, con efectos beneficiosos o potencialmente destructivos según sus características y tamaño. En este estudio nos centramos en los patrones de recurrencia de incendios forestales en la Comunidad Valenciana durante dos décadas (1993-2015). En base a investigación previa basada en el Mapa...

Projecting forest dynamics as a function of alternative management strategies and climatic conditions is key to develop sound forest policy and management planning. In Spain there is a need for a full set of climate-sensitive individual-tree growth and yield models suitable for country-level simulations. In this paper we present environmentally dri...

Both fire risk assessment and management of wildfire prevention strategies require different sources of data to represent the complex geospatial interaction that exists between environmental variables in the most accurate way possible. In this sense, geospatial analysis tools and remote sensing data offer new opportunities for estimating fire risk...

Improved understanding of fire activity and its influencing factors will impact the way we interact and coexist with not only the fire itself but also with the ecosystem as a whole. We consolidate more than 20 million wildfire records between 2000 and 2018 across the six continents. This data is processed with artificial intelligence methods to dis...

Due to the long time horizon typically characterizing forest planning, uncertainty plays an important role when developing forest management plans. Especially important is the uncertainty related to recently human-induced global warming since it has a clear impact on forest capacity to contribute to biogenic and anthropogenic ecosystem services. If...

Planning for management actions that address threats to biodiversity is important for securing its long term persistence. However, systematic conservation planning (SCP) has traditionally overlooked this aspect and just focused on identifying priority areas without any recommendation on actions needed. This paper develops a mixed integer mathematic...

The poster presents foreMA-DST, a Decision Support Tool aiming at facilitating multi-objective forest planning under climate change uncertainties, by integrating state of the art scientific knowledge into a management-oriented user interface.

The design of conservation management plans is a crucial task for ensuring the preservation of ecosystems. A conservation plan is typically embodied by two types of decisions: in which areas of a given territory it will be implemented, and how actions against threats will be deployed across these areas. These decisions are usually guided by the res...

In the climate change era, forest managers are challenged to use innovative tools to encourage a sustained provision of goods and services. Many decision support tools (DSTs), developed to address global changes in forest management practices, reflect the complexity of the scientific knowledge produced, a fact that could make it difficult for pract...

Decision-making processes in the European Forest Sector are characterized by an enormous diversity in institutional and political framework conditions. In general, there is a clear need to improve policy integration and management approaches in order to deliver the competing ecosystem services demanded by society. The Special Issue “Models and tool...

While very many decision-support (DS) tools (i.e. models and decision support systems (DSS)) have been developed to address forest management problems in Europe, the use of such tools in supporting forest policy processes remains limited. Additionally, while there has been very limited sharing of these tools between European countries, there may be...

Climate and social changes place strong demands on forest managers. Forest managers need powerful approaches and tools, which could help them to be able to react to the rapidly changing conditions. However, the complexity of quantifying forest ecosystems services as well as the complexity of current decision theories, technologies and operation res...

A core process in forestry planning corresponds to the design of optimal harvesting policies along with road network layouts. In the most common setting, decision makers seek for solutions that maximize the profit of the forest while respecting operative and market constraints. Due to the long-term nature of the industry, the inherent uncertainty i...

Adapting the management of forest resources to climate change involves addressing several crucial aspects to provide a valid basis for decision making. These include the knowledge and belief of decision makers, the mapping of management options for the current as well as anticipated future bioclimatic and socioeconomic conditions, and the ways deci...

We generate flexible management rules for black pine stands, adaptable to alternative stand management situations and entailing thinnings, final-felling, and salvage cuts, based on the results on 270 stand level optimizations. Forest management instructions often rely on the anticipated prediction of the stand development, which poses a challenge o...

Silvicultural models are often developed and applied without due consideration of fire modelling. Yet, this information is important for designing treatment options to lower fire hazard. We used the FlamMap software to assess potential fire behaviour under extreme fire weather conditions within a 10,881-ha maritime pine landscape in central Portugal, t...

We propose a multicriteria decision-making framework to support strategic decisions in forest management, taking into account uncertainty due to climate change and sustainability goals. In our setting, uncertainty is modeled by means of climate change scenarios. The decision task is to define a harvest scheduling that addresses, simultaneously, con...

In this work, we employed two different ecosystem models in two separate case studies to assess the effects of forest age structure, management and gradual climate change on timber production and carbon sequestration of Finnish boreal forests with Norway spruce as main (dominant) tree species. Our case study examples demonstrated that over the 90 y...

Assessing impacts of management strategies may allow designing more resistant forests to wildfires. Planning-oriented models to predict the effect of stand structure and forest composition on mortality for supporting fire-smart management decisions, and allowing its inclusion in forest management optimization systems were developed. Post-fire morta...

Recent studies projecting future climate change impacts on forests mainly consider either the effects of climate change on productivity or on disturbances. However, productivity and disturbances are intrinsically linked because 1) disturbances directly affect forest productivity (e.g. via a reduction in leaf area, growing stock or resource-use effi...

Land tenure heterogeneity may be an obstacle to forested landscape-level management planning and the provision of ecosystem services. This research focused on the potential of combining participatory workshops and multiple criteria decision methods (MCDMs) to support the development and negotiation of targets for the supply of ecosystem services an...

Land tenure heterogeneity may be an obstacle to forested landscape-level management planning and the provision of ecosystem services. This research focused on the potential of combining participatory workshops and multiple criteria decision methods (MCDMs) to support the development and negotiation of targets for the supply of ecosystem services an...

For forest sustainability and vulnerability assessment, the landscape scale is considered to be more and more relevant as the stand level approaches its known limitations. This review, which describes the main forest landscape simulation tools used in the 20 European case studies of the European project " Future-oriented integrated management of Eu...

An approach is proposed for incorporating the variations in timber growth and yield due to climate change uncertainty into the forest harvesting decision process. A range of possible climate scenarios are transformed by a forest growth and yield model into tree growth scenarios, which in turn are integrated into a multistage stochastic model that d...

The aim of this paper is to present approaches to optimize stand-level, short-rotation coppice management planning, taking into account uncertainty in stand growth due to climate change. The focus is on addressing growth uncertainty through a range of climate scenarios so that an adaptive capacity may be possible and the vulnerability of the stand...

We studied regional effects of alternative climate change and management scenarios on timber production, its economic profitability (net present value (NPV), with 2% interest rate), and carbon stocks over a 90 year simulation period in Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) forests located in southern, central, and northern Finland. We also compar...

The Special Issue Providing Ecosystem Services under Climate Change: Community of Practice of Forest Decision Support Systems is based on the presentations given at the 24th World Congress of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations and provides an overview on Forest Management Decision Support Systems currently designed and applied...

Despite the fact that the institutional environment is acknowledged to influence the implementation of regional adaptations of forest management to climate change, there are few empirical studies addressing the institutional factors and opportunities of adaptation. Using Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework, we aimed to identif...

Finding an optimal solution of forest management scheduling problems with even flow constraints while addressing spatial concerns is not an easy task. Solving these combinatorial problems exactly with mixed-integer programming (MIP) methods may be infeasible or else involve excessive computational costs. This has prompted the use of heuristics. In...

Cork oak stands are one of the major sources of income from Portuguese Mediterranean forests. Future climate is projected to increase temperatures, reduce precipitation and decrease current forests’ productivity and therefore, adapting management, is a key strategy to mitigate impacts of future climate on cork supply. The central objective of this...

While sustainable forestry in Europe is characterized by the provision of a multitude of forest ecosystem services, there exists no comprehensive study that scrutinizes their sensitivity to forest management on a pan-European scale, so far. We compile scenario runs from regionally tailored forest growth models and Decision Support Systems (DSS) fro...

Abstract: The evaluation of forest fuel loading is required by most fire management activities. However, the consideration of shrub biomass for forest planning purposes has been limited by the inability to predict its growth and accumulation. The main objective of this study was to model shrub biomass over time under a tree canopy to be able to inc...

The paper presents and discusses research aiming at the development of a forested landscape management scheduling model that may address the risk of wildfires. A general indicator is built from wildfire occurrence and damage probabilities to assess stand-level resistance to wildfires. This indicator is developed to further address the specificity o...

Cork oak (Quercus suber L.) and holm oak (Quercus rotundifolia) ecosystems are characteristic of Mediterranean forestry in Portugal. Even though cork is the most valuable product, these ecosystems provide multiple products and services. Assessing trade-offs between multiple goals is thus critical for the effectiveness of oak ecosystem management pl...

In boreal conditions, climate change is expected to increase mean annual temperature and precipitation, increasing forest growth and productivity in managed forests. In this study, we aimed at finding out how climate change affects the optimal management of Scots pine-, Norway spruce- and silver birch-dominated stands on sites of varying fertility...

Assessment of forest fuel loading is a prerequisite for most fire management activities. However, the inclusion of shrub biomass in forest planning has been hindered by the inability to predict its growth and accumulation. The main objective of this study was to model shrub biomass over time under a tree canopy with the aim of including shrub manag...

Strategic or long-term management planning plays a key role in the development of forest schedules as the temporal dimension is a determinant characteristic of all forestry production systems. In this chapter we address the representation of industrial forest strategic forest management problems as well as the interpretation of its solution. We sta...

Compared to other production systems, forests are characterized by the long-term of its outcomes (e.g. rotation lengths are high). In this system the state of nature that would prevail after such long periods is not known with certainty. The consequences of a decision depend on many uncontrollable variables which in turn determine the outcome of th...

• Context Climate change studies in Portugal point to warming winters and increase in the dry season length, impacting growth of plants. New tools are needed to increase the effectiveness of forest management planning under climate change. • Aims To develop research tools that may help forest managers cope with climate change challenges to long-ter...

The practice of multi-criteria forest management planning is often complicated by the need to explicit a priori the goals and preferences of the decision maker. This manuscript aims at describing an approach that may take advantage of a posteriori preference modelling to facilitate the specification of the levels of achievement of various objective...

Since forest planning is characterized by long time horizons and it typically involves large areas of land and numerous stakeholders, uncertainty and risk should be taken into account when developing forest management plans. There are many sources of uncertainty and risk, e.g. regarding the future states of nature, future market conditions, occurre...

Prospective study of the Portuguese forest sector up to 2071, considering a status quo and a "development scenario", with the definition and the cost-benefit analysis of the public policy measures needed to support this development.

Forest management planning in a region typically involves multiple stakeholders. Decisions processes are idiosyncratic, driven by individual goals and supported by segmented forest-based information. Nevertheless, stakeholders’ decisions do impact one another leading to complex interaction networks where communication, cooperation and negotiation p...

In this paper, we present a system to support decision making where different stakeholders have to generate landscape and forest level strategic plans for Leiria National Forest in Portugal. The approach, at first, tries to generate Pareto efficient frontiers for different objectives. Then, multiple decision makers are involved in the process to se...

The design and implementation of the adaptive forest management (AFM) ToolBox is presented. Design principles derived from previous experiences in decision support system (DSS) development include support for (1) modularity, (2) accessibility via the Internet, (3) inclusion of different types of knowledge and information, (4) the use of different d...

In order to share information on the development and use of forest management decision support systems (FMDSS), a European-initiated network has established a wiki website as part of its activities. Case studies and associated lessons learned were solicited from the network using semantic structures built on the wiki. A total of 31 cases from 10 di...

Muito antes do aparecimento do Homem na Terra já vários acontecimentos geofísicos como cheias, sismos, secas, etc. ocorriam, ameaçando a fauna e flora existente então. Passado bastante tempo a presença humana transformou estes acontecimentos geofísicos em desastres/catástrofes naturais. O nosso planeta é cenário de vários processos dinâmicos como o...

This paper presents a model to predict annual wildfire risk in pure and even-aged eucalypt stands in Portugal. Emphasis was in developing a management-oriented model, i.e. a model that might both: a) help assess wildfire occurrence probability as a function of readily available forest inventory data and b) help predict the effects of management opt...

This article presents and discusses research with the aim of developing a stand-level management scheduling model for short-rotation coppice systems that may take into account the risk of wildfire. The use of the coppice regeneration method requires the definition of both the optimal harvest age in each cycle and the optimal number of coppice cycle...