The goal of the Forest Structure project is to model forests from the level of individual trees up to entire wooded landscapes to better understand how the structure of forests could change under the pressures of climate change, disturbances from events such as fires and logging, and the succession of trees types.
Forest structure, which includes the density, distribution, and diversity of plant types, is controlled by acclimation, interaction, competition, and heterogeneity. These organizing principles can be modeled based on ecological theory and advanced aggregation methods developed at IIASA, but have yet to be utilized in large-scale predictive modeling. The project’s aim is to combine these state-of- the-art approaches in a new model that can evaluate three key research questions:
Ultimately, the new ecologically-based model will be linked to existing large scale forestry and land use frameworks to allow analyses to be more responsive to natural and anthropogenic disturbances of ecosystems.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313