Impact of Target Diameter Harvesting on Spatial and Temporal Pattern of Drought Risk in Forest Ecosystems Under Climate Change Conditions

Forests are influenced by many disturbances, especially drought, windthrow, pest attacks, air pollution, and forest management. The climate change results in increasing frequency of weather extremes which will probably cause drought stresses in European forest ecosystems. By integrating several new features within the BROOK90 model, smallscale coupled process-based modeling was carried out for different climate and target diameter harvesting scenarios in the region of Solling, Germany. The results show considerable increment of drought risks towards 2100 compared to “present climate conditions”, caused by changes in precipitation and increase of mean air temperature. Beyond this it is shown that for the Solling site the changes of structure and microclimate produced by target diameter harvesting result in a decrease of drought stress and could be implemented to mitigate drought events.