Thomas Knoke

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• Doctor of Forest Science
• Professor at Technical University of Munich

Biodiversity's contribution to human welfare has become a key argument for maintaining and enhancing biodiversity in managed ecosystems. The functional relationship between biodiversity (b) and economic value (V) is, however, insufficiently understood, despite the premise of a positive-concave bV relationship that dominates scientific and political...

Given the drastic changes in the environment, resilience is a key focus of ecosystem management. Yet, the quantification of the different dimensions of resilience remains challenging, particularly for long-lived systems such as forests. Here we present an analytical framework to study the economic resilience of different forest management systems,...

Reducing global forest losses is essential to mitigate climate change and its associated social costs. Multiple market and non-market factors can enhance or reduce forest loss. Here, to understand the role of non-market factors (for example, policies, climate anomalies or conflicts), we can compare observed trends to a reference (expected) scenario...

We analyse partial adoption decisions of two agroforestry alternatives using data from a Panamanian case study. Our analysis builds on two economic and two ecological decision criteria. It considers intervals in which the possible contributions of six land-use types to the decision criteria are assumed to reside. This results in a robust multi-obje...

Increasingly uncertain decision outcomes prevail in forest management and hamper choosing a single optimal management alternative. Confronting all management alternatives with multiple future scenarios and selecting an alternative minimising the regret under the worst scenario may provide suitable guidance under such uncertainty. Here, we search fo...

Persistent uncertainty about the economic implications of agroforestry presents a significant barrier to adoption. Despite this, most research to date ignores the impact of uncertainty on land allocation decisions, with studies commonly relying on simplistic scenarios involving a dichotomous choice between switching entirely to agroforestry or reta...

The effective conservation and management of critical ecosystems, such as tropical mountain forests, depends on informed decision-making in order to reduce biodiversity loss, protect ecosystem services, and mitigate socioeconomic impacts. However, providing decision-makers with reliable, site-specific data to navigate the uncertainties of forest ma...

Production forestry in New Zealand is undergoing a shift in the face of social, economic and environmental pressures. Technological developments such as the use of automation and precision forestry, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data are presenting opportunities for forestry that will allow us to respond to these challenges in ways not tried...

The discussion about economically optimal forest ecosystem management is almost as old as forest science. Continuous cover forestry renounces removing the tree canopy of forest ecosystems. In contrast, clear fell forestry suggests harvesting all trees at once to replace the crop trees with young trees. Assuming occurrence probabilities for stands o...

In dieser Stellungnahme ordnet der Wissenschaftliche Beirat für Waldpolitik die Ergebnisse der Bundeswaldinventur (BWI) 2022 in Bezug auf vier zentrale Handlungsfelder ein (1. Biodiversität und Waldnaturschutz, 2. Klimaschutzfunktion, Resilienz und Anpassungsfähigkeit an den Klimawandel, 3. Eigentum, Arbeit, Einkommen, 4. Rohstoffe, Verwendung und...

In dieser Kurzstellungnahme argumentiert der Wissenschaftlichen Beirat für Waldpolitik (WBW), dass die große Herausforderung der Anpassung der Wälder und der Waldwirtschaft an den globalen Wandel einer starken Unterstützung durch Forschung bedarf um effektive und effiziente Anpassungen zu ermöglichen und um Belastungen zukünftiger Generationen durc...

Forests provide important ecosystem services (ESs), including climate change mitigation, local climate regulation, habitat for biodiversity, wood and non‐wood products, energy, and recreation. Simultaneously, forests are increasingly affected by climate change and need to be adapted to future environmental conditions. Current legislation, including...

Auction theory has made major contributions to overcoming allocation problems involving asymmetric information and common-pool resources, leading to multiple Nobel Prizes and serving as a foundation for multi-billion-dollar markets. Despite evidence that related mechanisms could enhance the performance of payments for ecosystem services (PES), adop...

Economic development often impacts on ecosystem services. Previous studies have raised public and political awareness of the costs associated with such impacts and the benefits of ecosystem services. In cases where empirical information on the value of ecosystem services is lacking, benefit transfer (BT) approaches that use value estimates from a p...

Ensuring the integrity of the world’s forests is indispensable for mitigating climate change, combatting biodiversity loss, and protecting the livelihoods of rural communities. While many strategies have been developed to address deforestation across different geographic scales, measuring their impact against a fluctuating background of market-driv...

Ungulate browsing can prevent the successful regeneration and development of forest-owner-intended and climate-resilient admixed tree species, compromising the future provision of multiple ecosystem services. A reduction of the height increment of palatable tree species caused by ungulate browsing results in a competition shift in favor of less pal...

Accurate estimation of above-ground biomass (AGB) in forested areas is essential for studying forest ecological functions, surface carbon cycling, and global carbon balance. Over the past decade, models that harness the distinct features of multi-source remote sensing observations for estimating AGB have gained significant popularity. It is worth e...

Accurate segmentation of individual tree crowns (ITC) segmentation is essential for investigating tree-level based growth trends and assessing tree vitality. ITC segmentation using remote sensing data faces challenges due to crown heterogeneity, overlapping crowns and data quality. Currently, both classical and deep learning methods have been emplo...

Key message A validation convention can be established for forest management optimization models. It consists of (1) the delivery of face validation, (2) performing at least one other validation technique, and (3) an explicit discussion of how the optimization model fulfills the stated purpose. Validation by potential users or external experts is o...

Here we explore the contributions of close-to-nature forest stand types to ecosystem services under uncertainty and at a landscape scale.

Background Forests mitigate climate change by reducing atmospheric CO2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathrm {CO_2}$$\end{document}-concentrations thro...

Diskontieren ist in der Ökonomie ein Standardverfahren, um Zeitpräferenzen der Entscheiderinnen und Entscheider und die zukünftige Konsumentwicklung zu berücksichtigen. Allerdings werden vor allem Geldströme diskontiert, während weitere Ökosystemleistungen nicht diskontiert in Kosten-Nutzen-Analysen einfliessen. In Optimierungen mit mehreren Kriter...

Bereits vor 300 000 bis 400 000 Jahren begann der Mensch Holz als Energieträger zu nutzen [3.1]. Daran hat sich bis in die Gegenwart wenig geändert; noch heute sind weltweit mehr als 2 Mrd. Menschen von Holz als primärer Energiequelle abhängig [3.2] und nutzen vor allem in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern holzartige Biomasse zum Kochen und / oder...

Alte, naturnahe Laubwälder stehen zunehmend im Fokus der europäischen und nationalen Wald-politik. Sie haben eine besondere Bedeutung für den Schutz der biologischen Vielfalt und es wird häufig angenommen, dass sie einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Klimaschutz leisten und über eine hohe Anpassungsfähigkeit im Klimawandel verfügen. Vor diesem Hintergrund...

Using a metaphor based on a historical debate between socialist and free-market economists, Salliou and Stritih (Environ. Res. Lett. 18 151001) advocate for decentralizing environmental management to harness emergent complexity and promote ecosystem health. Concerningly, however, their account seems to leave little room for top-down processes like...

Old, near-natural deciduous forests are ever more in the focus of European and national forest policy. They are of particular importance for biodiversity protection, and it is often assumed that they contribute significantly to climate protection and are highly adaptable to climate change. Against this background, important forest-related policies...

Globale Veränderungen zeigen auf allen Ebenen Einfluss auf den Wald und die Forstwirtschaft. Beispielhafte Symptome der jüngeren Vergangenheit sind überregionale Holzmangellagen im Bauwesen oder Rückstau nicht abfließender Schadholzmengen. Gleichzeitig gewinnen vielfältige Ökosystemleistungen neben der Bereitstellung von Holz an Bedeutung. Diese Ra...

hnlich wie der Begriff der Nachhaltigkeit einige Jahrzehnte zuvor erfährt der Begriff der Resilienz derzeit eine bemerkenswert ansteigende Aufmerksamkeit: Ursprünglich als reiner Fachbegriff innerhalb der psychologischen Forschung verwendet, breitete er sich zunächst über die Ingenieurswissenschaften in die ökologischen Disziplinen aus. Seit einige...

Mithilfe des hier vorgestellten Modells lassen sich sowohl die Mischungsanteile von drei Baumarten als auch die zeitliche Verteilung und Stärke der waldbaulichen Eingriffe auf Bestandesebene optimieren. Betrachtet werden Douglasie, Kiefer und Eiche. Ziel der Optimierung ist ein robustes finanzielles Ergebnis und gleichzeitig eine robuste Kohlenstof...

Intensive ungulate browsing significantly impacts forests worldwide. However, it is usually not single browsing events that lead to sapling mortality, but the little-researched interactions of browsed saplings with their biotic and abiotic environment. (I) Our objective was to assess the impact of ungulate browsing on the growth of young saplings r...

A shifting focus in forest management from timber production to resilience and multifunctionality in the face of changing disturbance regimes might entail altering the species composition of forests. Although the conifers Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and silver fir (Abies alba) currently comprise only a small proportion of Central European f...

Die Fokusverschiebung im forstlichen Management, weg von der reinen Holzproduktion hin zumehr Widerstandsfähigkeit und Multifunktionalität in unseren Wäldern, wird Veränderungen inder Baumartenzusammensetzung nach sich ziehen. Hierbei werden insbesondere Douglasie undWeißtanne, die derzeit nur einen geringen Anteil in mitteleuropäischen Wäldern ein...

Baumbach et al. 1 estimate that climate damages to the carbon storage and habitat services provided by Central American forests will cost society $51-314 billion per year through the end of the century. Their costs greatly exceed past estimates of the total value of critical biodiversity hotspots in the Amazon rainforest 2 and even the potential co...

Current approaches to project spatial biodiversity responses to climate change mainly focus on the direct effects of climate on species while regarding land use and land cover as constant or prescribed by global land‐use scenarios. However, local land‐use decisions are often affected by climate change and biodiversity on top of socioeconomic and po...

Im Mai 2020 legte die EU-Kommission eine Biodiversitätsstrategie und anschliessend daran eine neue Waldstrategie vor. Deren Ziel ist es, die Resilienz von Wäldern in EU-Ländern zu erhöhen und damit langfristig die Multifunktionalität von Wäldern zu sichern. Ein übergeordnetes Konzept in der Waldstrategie bezüglich der Bewirtschaftung von Wäldern au...

Durch den Einsatz innovativer digitaler Technologien werden auch in der Forstwirtschaft sprunghafte Effizienzgewinne durch Nutzung des Konzepts Industrie 4.0 erwartet. Diese werden bisher insbesondere im Bereich der Holzbereitstellung gesehen, also in einem verhältnismässig kleinen Ausschnitt der gesamten forstlichen Produktion. Während das grosse...

Considering in situ carbon storage in forest management has gained momentum under increasing pressure to decarbonize our economies. Here, we present results from case studies in Portugal and Germany showing the opportunity costs of in situ carbon storage derived by multiple-objective optimization. We used a stand-level model to optimize land expect...

Climate change has significant effects on forest ecosystems around the world. Since tree diameter increment determines forest volume increment and ultimately forest production, an accurate estimate of this variable under future climate change is of great importance for sustainable forest management. In this study, we modeled tree diameter increment...

Abstract 1. How to simultaneously combat biodiversity loss and maintain ecosystem functioning while improving human welfare remains an open question. Optimization approaches have proven helpful in revealing the trade-offs between multiple functions and goals provided by land-cover configurations. The R package optimLanduse provides tools for easy a...

Assessment of the effectiveness of policies to preserve natural forests and the eco-nomic benefits we derive from them is of high international relevance. Here we use a counterfactual simulation approach to compare observed and expected deforesta-tion for Brazil, DR Congo and Indonesia. We reveal changes in the social costs of carbon (SCC), which c...

Determining the desirable composition of a forested landscape and its associated ecosystem services (ES) is challenging because the solutions must reconcile the preferences of various forest stakeholders and account for uncertain data. By combining multi-objective robust optimization with an online survey of forest professionals in Slovenia (n = 13...

Forests mitigate climate change by storing carbon and reducing emissions via substitution effects of wood products. Additionally, they provide many other important ecosystem services (ESs), but are vulnerable to climate change; therefore, adaptation is necessary. Climate-smart forestry combines mitigation with adaptation, whilst facilitating the pr...

Auctions have attracted growing attention as bidding mechanisms for soliciting or allocating payments for a wide range of ecosystem services (ES). This paper reviews the latest scientific knowledge on ES auctioning approaches. Using systematically selected academic articles; we trace and discuss the development of ES auction literature across space...

Finding the optimal land allocation for providing ecosystem services, conserving biodiversity and maintaining rural livelihoods is a key challenge of agricultural management and land-use planning. Agroforestry has been widely discussed as a sustainable land-use solution and as one strategy to improve the provision of multiple ecological and economi...

In Europe, forest management has controlled forest dynamics to sustain commodity production over multiple centuries. Yet over‐regulation for growth and yield diminishes resilience to environmental stress as well as threatens biodiversity, leading to increasing forest susceptibility to an array of disturbances. These trends have stimulated interest...

Discounting is standard in economics to consider time preferences of people and account for future market changes. However, so far discounting has mainly been applied to monetary flows and ignored for many ecosystem services. In multi-objective optimization, selectively disregarding time preference for some nonmonetary services create bias. Here we...

What is Closer to Nature Forest Management? Closer-to-Nature Forest Management is a new concept proposed in the EU Forest Strategy for 2030, which aims to improve the conservation values and climate resilience of multifunctional, managed forests in Europe. Building on the latest scientific evidence, this report attempts to define the concept based...

Sustainable intensification of agricultural lands might reconcile the conservation of tropical forest with food production, but in-depth assessments considering uncertainty and extreme values are missing. Uncertainty prohibits mapping probabilities to potential future states or ranking these states in terms of their likelihood. This in turn hampers...

CONTEXT: Farmers are facing increasing pressure to practice multifunctional agriculture. Producing woody biomass through short rotation coppices (SRC) provides an economic opportunity for farmers to diversify their agricultural income while potentially providing environmental benefits. OBJECTIVE: Using multi-objective, robust optimization we inves...

Current modelling approaches to predict spatially explicit biodiversity responses to climate change mainly focus on the direct effects of climate on species. Integration of spatiotemporal land-cover scenarios is still limited. Current approaches either regard land cover as constant boundary conditions, or rely on general, typically globally defined...

Few land-allocation models consider the impact of off-farm income on tropical deforestation. We provide a concept to integrate off-farm income in a mechanistic multiple-objective land-allocation model, while distinguishing between farms with and without re-allocation of on-farm labor to obtain off-farm income. On farms with re-allocation of labor w...

This book, with contributions from leading academics - and including reviews and case studies from Ethiopian Church forests - provides a valuable reference for advanced students and researchers interested in forest and other natural resource management, ecology and ecosystem services as well as restoration options. The book addresses various aspec...

Increased frequencies of storms and droughts due to climate change are changing central European forests more rapidly than in previous decades. To monitor these changes, multispectral 3D remote sensing (RS) data can provide relevant information for forest management and inventory. In this case study, data of the multispectral 3D-capable satellite s...

Ungulate browsing has a major impact on the composition and structure of forests. Repeatedly conducted, large-scale regeneration inventories can monitor the extent of browsing pressure and its impacts on forest regeneration development. Based on the respective results, the necessity and extent of wildlife management activities such as hunting, fenc...

Forest management faces growing uncertainty concerning environmental conditions and demand for ecosystem services. To help forest managers consider uncertainty, we applied a robust and multi-criteria approach to select the optimal composition of a forest enterprise from 12 stand types. In our simulation, the forest enterprise strives for either fin...

Models are essential to assess the socio-economic credentials of new agroforestry systems. In this study, we showcase robust optimisation as a tool to evaluate agroforestry’s potential to meet farmers’ multiple goals. Our modelling approach has three parts. First, we use a discrete land-use model to evaluate two agroforestry systems (alley cropping...

Changing forest disturbance regimes pose a major challenge for current day forestry. Yet our understanding of the economic impacts of disturbances remains incomplete. Existing valuations of losses from natural disturbances commonly exclude extreme events and neglect impacts on standing timber. Here we develop a new methodology to assess the economi...

Purpose of Review Our review provides an overview of forest attributes measurable by forest inventory that may support the integration of non-provisioning ecosystem services (ES) and biodiversity into forest planning. The review identifies appropriate forest attributes to quantify the opportunity for recreation, biodiversity promotion and carbon st...

Geeignete Bewirtschaftungskonzepte für den Wald von morgen können durch FernerkundungsDaten ergänzt werden. Benötigt werden 3D-Daten zur Strukturabschätzung und MultispektralDaten zur Baumarten-Annäherung. Nur die Fernerkundung gibt es nicht, genauso wenig ein Universalrezept zur Bewirtschaftung von Nutzwäldern. Da viele in der Wissenschaft gängige...

Sustainable forest management requires tools to guide optimal silvicultural treatments. Timing and intensity of thinnings and timing of final harvest are key decisions. An Optimized Reforestation Management (herein, an ORM) model was developed to reach the optimal combination of thinning times, thinning intensities and rotation periods for Ecuadori...

Understanding farmers' perceptions of and preferences towards agroforestry is essential to identify systems with the greatest likelihood of adoption to inform successful rural development projects. In this study we offer a novel approach for evaluating agroforestry systems from the farmer perspective. The approach couples rapid rural appraisal and...

Forest owners and managers deal with an increasing demand for forest ecosystem services (ES). In addition, a recent change can be observed from a governmental top-down approach to bottom-up initiatives, including efforts of the local population to have a say in forest management decisions. Matching supply and demand is seen as a basic condition for...

Monitoring urban growth patterns is an important measure to improve our understanding of land use/land cover (LULC) changes and a central part in the proper development of any city. In this study, we analyzed the changes over a period of 30 years (1985–2015) in Bahir Dar, one of the rapidly growing cities of northwest Ethiopia. Satellite images of...

Mixed mountain forests, primarily made up of Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.), silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), cover about 10 × 10 6 ha of submontane-subalpine altitudes in Europe. They provide invaluable ecosystem services, e.g. protection against avalanches, landslides or rockfall. However, pure Norwa...

Forest management decisions about species mixture and harvest time are usually bound to economic considerations. Ecosystem services (ES), aside from timber production, are hardly considered. Although the consideration of multiple ES became common in recent years, it is still unclear how ES can be integrated into forest optimization and how this cha...

Agroforestry has been promoted as a key forest landscape restoration (FLR) option to restore ecosystem services in degraded tropical landscapes. We investigated the share and type of agroforestry selected in an optimized landscape, accounting for a mosaic of alternative forest landscape restoration options (reforestation and natural succession) and...

Wie lässt sich angesichts von zunehmenden Extremereignissen noch planen? (Essay) Die zunehmende Häufung und Intensität von Extremereignissen stellt eine grosse Herausforderung für eine geregelte Forstwirtschaft dar. Damit eine mittel- und langfristig ausgerichtete Forstplanung unter diesen unsicheren Bedingungen noch sinnvoll durchgeführt werden ka...

Assessing pre-defined strategies remains the status quo for studies supporting silvicultural decision-making for future forest management, yet, such strategies may not fully address decision-makers’ preferences and uncertainty attitudes. We develop a continuous stand-level optimisation approach that integrates multiple decision criteria, uncertain...

Environmental studies regularly use the net present value (NPV) to value benefits and costs of projects. However, the NPV disregards whether the stream of net benefits is steady or volatile and ignores the distribution of net benefits among different groups of people. Here we test alternatives to NPV, building on two example cases: 1) We use discou...

Agroforestry is hypothesised to increase ecological and economic functions of farms. Yet it is unclear if and how much agroforestry should be embedded in diversified farming systems to satisfy farmers' needs while potentially enhancing environmental services. To address this research gap we use a mathematical programming model to investigate the ro...

Land‐based solutions are indispensable features of most climate mitigation scenarios. Here we conduct a novel cross‐sectoral assessment of regional carbon mitigation potential by running an ecosystem model with an explicit representation of forest structure and climate impacts for Bavaria, Germany, as a case study. We drive the model with four high...

Conversion of tropical forests is among the primary causes of global environmental change. The loss of their important environmental services has prompted calls to integrate ecosystem services (ES) in addition to socio‐economic objectives in decision‐making. To test the effect of accounting for both ES and socio‐economic objectives in land‐use deci...

Because of the very high complexity of modern optimization models based on single trees, uncertainties are often disregarded. In this study, we present a modelling approach that allows partial harvesting but is still simple enough to consider risk. Our modelling approach investigates whether the inclusion of timber price uncertainty influences the...