Optimizing management to enhance multifunctionality in a boreal forest landscape

The boreal biome, representing approximately one third of remaining global forests, provides a number of crucial ecosystem services (e.g. Bradshaw et al. 2009; Hansen et al. 2010). A particular challenge in forests is to reconcile demand for increased timber production with provisioning of other ecosystem services and biodiversity. However, there is still little knowledge about how forest management could help solve this challenge. Here, we applied seven alternative forest management regimes using a forest growth simulator in a large boreal forest production landscape. First, we estimated the potential of the landscape to provide harvest revenues, store carbon and maintain biodiversity. Then, we applied multiobjective optimization (Miettinen 1999) to identify trade-offs between these three objectives, and to identify the optimal combination of forest management regimes to achieve these objectives. Our results show that no forest management regime alone is able to maximize timber revenues, carbon storage and biodiversity individually or simultaneously, and that a combination of different regimes is needed to resolve the conflicts among these objectives. We conclude that it is possible to reduce the trade-offs between different objectives by applying diversified forest management planning at the boreal landscape-level and that we need to give up the all-encompassing objective of very intensive timber production, which is prevailing particularly in Fennoscandian countries.