SRS Strategic Framework - Large-Scale Assessment

Landscape and Regional Integrated Assessment and Modeling

The overriding goal of this Cross-Cutting Theme (CCT) is to understand how biological, climatic, physical, and social systems operate at large scales. Understanding and managing large-scale ecosystems, including their forested components, is a complex problem that requires integration of analyses across numerous disciplines, including ecological and social sciences. This is fundamental to understanding how these systems might respond to cultural and environmental changes in the future and how policy and management decisions might affect these outcomes.

The Integrated Assessment and Modeling CCT provides a framework for interdisciplinary research to address regional environmental questions in the South. It will bring together scientists from diverse disciplines to develop general methods for conducting integrated assessments.

A coordinated framework will be developed to identify environmental trends in the South, relate these trends to their causes and consequences, and predict future scenarios and the uncertainty associated with each scenario. The framework will include three major topic areas: 1) a report card on the status and trends of multiple resources within the South and identification of related environmental and socioeconomic drivers of change; 2) an evaluation of forest ecosystem status and trends related to environmental and human-induced causes and predictions of future change; and, 3) a strategy for identifying and evaluating approaches to achieving sustainable and productive forests which ddresses the needs of forest land managers.

Kinds of Research

The Southern Research Station has three research work units that are currently conducting regional assessments: global change, forest health monitoring, and forest inventory. The other units are conducting research on the landscape, watershed, stand, and individual tree spatial scales which can be scaled up to address important regional issues. All scientific disciplines contribute to addressing the many large-scale questions, for example: 1) what are the status and trends of multiple resources in the Southern United States? 2) what are the impacts of environmental stress (precipitation, drought, ozone, CO2, insects, and diseases) and human-induced change (population growth, demographic change, and shifting resource demands) on forest structure and function within the South? 3) how can the productivity and sustainability of forested ecosystems be assessed at various spatial and temporal scales leading to regional assessments? 4) how would the overall productivity of southern forestry be influenced by more-intensive management regimes? and, 5) how can stand-level forest models be scaled up for regional assessments?

Proposed Outcomes

1. Models to determine how different demand, land use, and societally acceptable management scenarios might affect landscape functions and values.
2. Development of an interdisciplinary, integration framework to guide development and application of models that can account for biological, physical, and human interactions in an ecosystem context.
3. Development of a modeling framework that can be incorporated into an integrated assessment of human and environmental disturbances.
4. Development and testing of landscape metrics that have ecological and social relevance and testing of indicators for assessing forest health.
5. Evaluation of landscape assessment approaches and tools.
6. Development of improved approaches for considering human dimensions of ecosystems across a range of relevant social sciences.

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