Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the session organisers, we would like to invite you to submit abstracts for oral talks and posters to the Session “T2.18. Mixed Forest plantations as resilient natured-based solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation” of the IUFRO 2024 Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, 23 – 29 June 2024. 

This session will focus on findings from tree diversity experiments and silvicultural trials comparing mixtures with monocultures in forest plantations. Abstracts can be submitted until 2 June 2023 at https://iufro2024.com/call-for-congress-abstracts/ 

 

Best regards,
Hernán Serrano-León 

 

T2.18. Mixed forest plantations as natured-based solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation 

Session organizers: Hernán Serrano-León, Ramona Werner, Joel Jensen, Hervé Jactel, Carolyn Glynn 

Forest plantations globally provide an increasingly large share of the wood products that contribute to a carbon-neutral bioeconomy, while reducing the harvest pressure on native and natural forests. Their importance is likely to increase with the projected rise in the global demand for the provision of multiple forest goods, and the increasing threat to natural forests posed by climate change. Yet, plantations are faced with controversies related to the potential negative impacts of dominating monospecific plantations for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functions and to the increasing vulnerability of monocultures to biotic and abiotic risks intensified by climate change (CC). 

A growing body of evidence suggests that multi-specific mixed forest plantations provide a wider array of ecosystem services and can be more efficient in sequestrating carbon, while better coping with CC-related stress and biotic disturbances. These results can be traced to mechanisms of complementary or facilitated resource use and alleviated competition in mixed plantations, and can result from a “portfolio effect” of diversification that minimizes the risk of a given species or forest function to be drastically affected. Nevertheless, there is an apparent reluctance among landowners and stakeholders to adopt mixed plantations as a nature-based solution for CC mitigation and adaptation. Among the possible factors preventing the expansion of mixed plantations is an insufficient scientific base for management practices regarding the type of species mixtures that optimize CC mitigation, adaptation and ecosystem functioning across contrasting site conditions.  

This session focuses on findings from tree diversity experiments, silvicultural trials comparing mixtures with monocultures, and analyses of the socio-economic contexts of tree-species diverse plantations. This session presents recent research that 1) improves the mechanistic understanding behind the potential of mixed- forest plantations to mitigate and adapt to climate change, or 2) identifies trade-offs and synergies among adaptation, mitigation and other objectives in the management of mixed-forest plantations. The final aim of this session is to identify the knowledge gaps that prevent progress towards a wider implementation of mixed plantations in adaptive forest management strategies and restoration measures, and to discuss research approaches to fill these gaps.