SilvaRING

SilvaRING: A new generation of forest growth simulation for Bavaria - better mapping of drought, climate change and annual growth

Producing reliable estimates of forest growth is becoming more challenging with the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events such as drought which have been observed in Europe over the past several decades. In addition, forest growth models are limited in their ability to estimate forest growth with annual climate variations due to multi-year prediction intervals. The SilvaRING project aims to improve the Silva forest growth model by allowing annual prediction of forest growth and estimating the impact of climatic events such as drought and temperature extremes.

The specific objectives of the project include:

1. Updating growth equations to allow annual prediction of forest growth parameters including diameter and height growth, and mortality
2. Include impacts of climatic events such as drought on tree growth based on recent scientific publications and tree ring data from several long-term forest monitoring plots across Bavaria
3. Provide access to the SILVA model through an open source R package
4. Create a shiny app user interface for interacting with the SilvaR package

The results of this project will be improved ability to make annual predictions and reports on the status of forests across Bavaria, Germany, and Central Europe.  Forest managers and practitioners will also have more control over estimating the impact of climate change and extreme events on the forests they manage. Finally, a larger user base of forest managers, researchers, and professors will be able to make forest growth simulations with the increased accessibility and useability of Silva through R.

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Contact

Christopher Chase

Torben Hilmers