SCENARIO DEVELOPMENT FOR THE FORESTS ECOSYSTEM SERVICES IMITATION MODELLING

Sustainable forest management implies the necessity to maintain and uphold balance between the growing demand for the forest ecosystem services (ES) and capabilities present. This issue motivates the development of ways to include various ES into the forest ecosystems planning and management system, taking into account social, political, environmental and economic contexts. One of the effective tools for the ES management is imitation modeling, which allows assessing the decision-making risks and consequences. This raises the scientific problem of substantiating possible alternative scenarios for the future forest area development for subsequent simulation. This article is aimed at analyzing the approaches to creating scenarios for the development of a forest area for the local level imitation modelling and testing a new method based on the development of the existing approaches to solving this problem. In its first part, modern research analysis in the field of imitation scenarios development is presented; the second one proposes a new scenarios’ compiling method, created within the framework of the POLYFORES project, and also presents the results of its testing at three model sites located in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the Republic of Karelia and the Moscow region. For the forest plots of the Nizhny Novgorod region, four scenarios for the forest area development have been created, aimed at obtaining benefits: 1 — from timber harvesting, 2 — from recreational ES and food forest resources, 3 — from regulating ES, 4 — both from timber harvesting, under the conditions of intensified forest growing, and from regulatory ES. For forest plots in the Republic of Karelia, the first scenario describes the situation of meeting the demand for wood, while also preserving the biodiversity and regulating ES, the second and third scenarios take into account the increased demand for wood, with low and high priorities for environmental conservation. For the forest plots of the Moscow region, only two scenarios were relevant, with the increasing need of citizens for recreational ES, and the biodiversity preservation priority in management decisions making either remaining low or increasing. For each scenario, forestry activities corresponding to the objectives of management have been developed. The proposed scenarios can be used to obtain information about the various management decisions impact on the forest ES supply.