Legacies, socio-economic and biophysical processes and drivers : the case of future forest cover expansion in the Polish Carpathians and Swiss Alps

Mountain forest areas are key for providing a wide range of ecosystem services and are hot spots for land use change processes, in particular, increase in forest cover at the expense of mountain pastures and meadows. Mountain forest systems in eastern and western Europe have likely similar future socio-economic situations but significantly different socio-economic history. Using a scenario-based land use modelling approach (Dyna-CLUE framework) we model three scenarios (trend, liberalisation and self-sufficiency) of future land use in the Polish Carpathians and the Swiss Alps, focussing on forest cover change. We find that forest cover increase can be expected to continue in European mountainous regions under all likely scenarios, limited only by relatively strict policy interventions. Biophysical factors, rather than socio-eco- nomic ones, are key for defining the suitability for, and therefore likely locations of future forest cover, but land use legacy plays a very important role in the spatial pat- terns of future forest cover, particularly in eastern Europe

A standard protocol for reporting species distribution models

Species distribution models (SDMs) constitute the most common class of models across ecology, evolution and conservation. The advent of ready-to-use software packages and increasing availability of digital geoinformation have considerably assisted the application of SDMs in the past decade, greatly enabling their broader use for informing conservation and management, and for quantifying impacts from global change. However, models must be fit for purpose, with all important aspects of their development and applications properly considered. Despite the widespread use of SDMs, standardisation and documentation of modelling protocols remain limited, which makes it hard to assess whether development steps are appropriate for end use. To address these issues, we propose a standard protocol for reporting SDMs, with an emphasis on describing how a study's objective is achieved through a series of modeling decisions. We call this the ODMAP (Overview, Data, Model, Assessment and Prediction) protocol, as its components reflect the main steps involved in building SDMs and other empirically-based biodiversity models. The ODMAP protocol serves two main purposes. First, it provides a checklist for authors, detailing key steps for model building and analyses, and thus represents a quick guide and generic workflow for modern SDMs. Second, it introduces a structured format for documenting and communicating the models, ensuring transparency and reproducibility, facilitating peer review and expert evaluation of model quality, as well as meta-analyses. We detail all elements of ODMAP, and explain how it can be used for different model objectives and applications, and how it complements efforts to store associated metadata and define modelling standards. We illustrate its utility by revisiting nine previously published case studies, and provide an interactive web-based application to facilitate its use. We plan to advance ODMAP by encouraging its further refinement and adoption by the scientific community

Gridded climate data from 5 Global Climate Models (GCM) of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) downscaled to 30 arc seconds for Europe, with links to NetCDF files

Studies on the impact of historical, current and future global change require very high-resolution climate data (less or equal 1km) as a basis for modelled responses, meaning that data from digital climate models generally require substantial rescaling. Another shortcoming of available datasets on past climate is that the effects of sea level rise and fall are not considered. Without such information, the study of glacial refugia or early Holocene plant and animal migration are incomplete if not impossible. Sea level at the last glacial maximum (LGM) was approximately 125m lower, creating substantial additional terrestrial area for which no current baseline data exist. Here, we introduce the development of a novel, gridded climate dataset for LGM that is both very high resolution (1km) and extends to the LGM sea and land mask. We developed two methods to extend current terrestrial precipitation and temperature data to areas between the current and LGM coastlines. The absolute interpolation error is less than 1°C and 0.5 °C for 98.9% and 87.8% of all pixels for the first two 1 arc degree distance zones. We use the change factor method with these newly assembled baseline data to downscale five global circulation models of LGM climate to a resolution of 1km for Europe. As additional variables we calculate 19 'bioclimatic' variables, which are often used in climate change impact studies on biological diversity. The new LGM climate maps are well suited for analysing refugia and migration during Holocene warming following the LGM

TEMPEX: Developing spatial layers of climatic temperature extremes: Final report in the BAFU-WSL program “Forests and Climate Change”

In this project we calculated eight indices of temperature extremes and a compound index of frost frequency after leaf flush, which was tuned to four different species and calculated in a prognostic mode. The eight indices extracted from downscaled climate data, scaled to NFI plots (1 x 1 km NFI 1 network) in Switzerland for current and projected future climates, included the following: (1) the absolute annual minimum temperature; (2) absolute annual maximum temperature; (3) the annual number of frost days (Tmin < 0°C); (4) the annual number of frozen days (Tmax < 0°C); (5) the annually largest diurnal temperature range; (6) the mean annual diurnal temperature range; (7) the annually longest period of continuous frost days (Tmin < 0°C); (8) the annually longest period of continuous frozen days (Tmax < 0°C). All nine measures generated here indicate that the projected climate trends are affecting the temperature extremes as much as they do the temperature means. The extremes decrease at a rate comparable to temperature means, and the climatic conditions become gradually suitable to species that are less tolerant to low temperature extremes. By the end of the 21st Century, the climate barely reaches conditions represented as the cold limit of Mediterranean species (30-year mean of annual absolute minimum temperatures of ca. -6 °C on the Swiss Plateau). Since the climate is fluctuating quite considerably, and because the trajectory barely reaches this threshold towards the end of the 21st Century, it is not very likely that truly mediterranean species will already find suitable habitats then. Rather, sub-mediterranean and warm-temperate species will be the preferred choice for adaptive and active forest management practice. It remains to be considered that the indices presented here do not include drought, which represents another important constraint for the choice of suitable tree species. Caution is needed when interpreting the presented results. First, we only use data from one scenario (A1B), whereas there is uncertainty as to which of the usually four scenarios used is actually most suitable for describing the future trajectory of the climate. Second, we only use data from three regional climate models (CLM, RCA30, RegCM3) that are all fed by data from the same global circulation model (ECHAM5). This means that only a small variety of possible futures is explored. Finally, we had to request new versions of the obtained data from Meteotest due to errors found during the processing. While we think that most problems are solved now, we are not completely the currently used data is error-free, as we still found some patterns that are counterintuitive. Some of this may originate from the RCM data, though