Towards quantifying the adaptive capacity of forests in Europe from a social-ecological perspective (TOADAPT)

• Applicant: Judit Lecina-Diaz, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Forestry
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551775429

Forest disturbances, such as windthrows, insect-outbreaks and wildfires, are worsening due to climate change. The ability of forests to adapt to these disturbances is critical to reducing their vulnerability and will ultimately define future forests. However, there are still uncertainties in quantifying adaptive capacity in forests. Since forests in Europe are at the interface between ecology and society, their adaptive capacity to disturbances is affected by both domains, but these are rarely considered together. In this project, I aim to quantify adaptive capacity from a social-ecological perspective. Specifically, I aim to (i) identify the most common adaptive measures and indicators of forest social-ecological adaptive capacity, and their effect on ecosystem services (WP1); (ii) to understand and assess the regional patterns of forest adaptive capacity from a social-ecological perspective (WP2); and (iii) to operationalize and map forest adaptive capacity at the continental scale (WP3). My project is a multi-scale study focused on two scales, the regional scale to understand the mechanisms behind adaptive capacity (WP2), and the continental scale to identify the areas with the lowest and highest adaptive capacity to support forest policy and management in Europe (WP3). To accomplish this, I will conduct a literature review to identify the critical indicators of adaptive capacity, such as the pool of species available to future conditions or the knowledge and technology to adapt. I will determine the importance of these indicators by expert consultation and using a random forest model. Subsequently, I will gather and harmonize different ecological and social-economical data to obtain a composite indicator of adaptive capacity, including social perceptions obtained through stakeholder questionnaires. This project builds upon my previous and ongoing research towards an independent career, expanding my work on vulnerability and risk approaches from an innovative perspective, and will also benefit from my experience with stakeholder studies and data already available and preprocessed. Assessing adaptive capacity from a social-ecological perspective will aid in developing adaptive strategies to cope with the future increase in forest disturbances.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants