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Poster Number:
72
Presenter/Primary Author:
Matthew Duveneck New England is among the most forested and densely populated regions in the U.S. The cultural landscape provision’s a range of complementary and competing ecosystem services, which are threatened by a slow conversion of forests to developed uses. Variation in anticipated climate and land use change results in large uncertainty surrounding the forest’s ability to provision services into the future. There is an urgent need to better understand the relative and interactive effects of climate change, harvesting, and conversion on ecosystem functions and services. We used a forest landscape model (LANDIS-II/PnET-Succession) coupled to a cellular land cover change model (Dinamica) to simulate a 100 year continuation of the recent trends of land use and climate change and quantified the resulting impacts on forest carbon and species composition. Simulated forest growth, resulting from the protracted recovery from nineteenth century land use, was the most important factor influencing the future forest carbon. Both climate change and land use are expected to vary spatially across New England. This variation will be important to consider when managing at landscape scales.
