New Grants Spur Research on Future Scenarios of Forest Change

The Harvard Forest received three grants totaling $150,000 from the LTER Program, the Jessie B. Cox Charitable Trust and Highstead to support a new research project on Future Scenarios of Landscape Change. The project brings together scientists and stakeholders to develop narrative scenarios for how climate and land use change will shape forests over the next century in four focal regions of the US. The researchers will incorporate the scenarios into spatially explicit models to analyze the consequences of these varied futures on important ecosystem services such as biomass, wood supply, carbon sequestration, water quantity and quality, habitat structure and biodiversity. The recent grants will support the work of Kathy Fallon Lambert, Director of the Harvard Forest Science & Policy Integration Project to lead stakeholder engagement activities and a review of existing forest assessments, and the work of David Mladenoff at the University Wisconsin to conduct a forest modeling pilot project. The Future Scenarios of Forest Change projects is a collaboration among scientists affiliated with six LTER sites and other institutions. Participating scientists include: David Foster, Harvard Forest; Tom Spies, Andrews Experimental Forest, David Mladenoff, University of Wisconsin; Steve Carpenter, University of Wisconsin; Terry Chapin, University of Alaska; Ted Gragson, Coweeta Experimental Forest; Jonathan Thompson, Smithsonian Institution; and Rob Scheller, Portland State University.