Ecosystem Services and Forest Management in Europe: Perspectives from the EU Project ALTERFOR

ALTERFOR provides a state of the art European perspective on forest management and the provision of ES throughout Europe. Considerable effort has been invested in improving the applied DSS models’ capabilities to provide ES projections for large forested landscapes while maintaining down to the stand level silvicultural diversity. The degree of detail in the silvicultural scenarios and associated ES provision modelling, while embedded in large scale market and climate change scenarios and stakeholder preference research, is unprecedented for such a large collection of forest DSS/models and variety of forested landscapes. From the experiences gained so far, we learned that a most important field for DSS, model and scenario development is the integration of extreme climate related events. While this compilation of results for aFMMs clearly indicates the potential to increase the provision of all considered ES individually, the obtainable synergies and tradeoffs often vary from region to region.