ARANGE

Project duration

2012-2015 (completed)

Project overview

Advanced multifunctional management of European mountain forest RANGE (ARANGE)

The project Advanced multifunctional forest management in European mountain RANGEs evaluated the capacity of current forest management regimes and possible alternative future management to provide portfolios of ecosystem services (ES) from European mountain forests. The project included a wide range of forest types in the major European mountain ranges and seeks to develop and evaluate strategies for their multifunctional management under risk and uncertainty due to changing climate and socio-economic conditions. To analyse conflicts and complementarities among ES from stand to landscape scale, improved models for the assessment and projection of ES as well as novel planning and decision support tools have been developed and applied to regional case studies as informed by decision makers and other stakeholders in the study regions.

The overall aims of ARANGE have been:

• to investigate the potentials and limitations of current and possible future approaches to mountain forest management for providing portfolios of ES under current and future climatic and socio-economic conditions
• to identify related risks and uncertainties
• to translate the scientific state of knowledge about the efficient provision of multiple ES from mountain forests into decision support for policy makers and forest practitioners, so as to improve the robustness of planning tools in real-world decision making.

The project addressed four main ecosystem services:

• timber production
• protection against gravitational natural hazards
• the role of forests in climate change mitigation via carbon sequestration as well as bioenergy production, and
• nature conservation and the maintenance of biodiversity

In ARANGE, state-of-the-art models of forest dynamics at stand and landscape scales have be used. The development focus of the project was on (i) the quantitative assessment of a range of ES, and (ii) in planning and decision support tools and approaches.

ARANGE has been a Collaborative Project within FP7 (Theme KBB.2011.1.2-07) funded by the European Commission. The consortium comprised in total 16 partner institutions from 11 countries and the European Forest Institute (EFI) as an international partner, coordinating institution was the Institute of Silviculture, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU).

My entire PhD project was embedded in ARANGE, which allowed me to collaborate with many researchers across Europe (see below). The EU project was also funding my PhD which was carried out at the Chair of Forest Ecology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Harald Bugmann

Project partners and collaborators

• Harald Bugmann ETH Zurich - WP leader in ARANGE and PhD supervisor
• Maxime Cailleret ETH Zurich now at INRAE Aix-en-Provence, France - PhD co-supervisor and co-author
• Dario Martin-Benito ETH Zurich now at INIA Madrid, Spain - collaborator and co-author in a chapter of my PhD
• Che Elkin ETH Zurich now at University of Northern British Columbia - project partner and co-author
• Matija Klopčič University of Ljubljana, Slovenia - project partner and co-author
• Florian Irauschek BOKU Vienna, now at the Austrian Research Centre for Forests, Austria - project partner and co-author
• Thomas Cordonnier INRAE Grenoble, France - project partner and co-author
• Manfred J. Lexer BOKU Vienna, Austria - ARANGE coordinator

Key publications

Mina M, Bugmann H, Cordonnier T, Irauschek F, Klopcic M, Pardos M, Cailleret M. (2017). Future ecosystem services from European mountain forests under climate change. Journal of Applied Ecology, 54(2), 389–401.

Mina M, Martin-Benito D, Bugmann H, Cailleret M. (2016). Forward modeling of tree-ring width improves simulation of forest growth responses to drought. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 221, 13–33.

Mina M, Bugmann H, Klopcic M, Cailleret M. (2017). Accurate modeling of harvesting is key for projecting future forest dynamics: a case study in the Slovenian mountains. Regional Environmental Change, 17(1), 49–64.

Klopčič M, Mina M, Bugmann H, Boncina A. (2017). The prospects of silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) and Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst) in mixed mountain forests under various management strategies, climate change and high browsing pressure. European Journal of Forest Research, 136(5–6), 1071–1090.

Irauschek F, Barka I, Bugmann H, Courbaud B, Elkin C, Hlásny T, Klopcic M, Mina M, Rammer W, Lexer MJ. (2021) Evaluating five forest models using multi-decadal inventory data from mountain forests. Ecological Modelling, 445, 109493.

Mina M, Bugmann H, (2013). ARANGE D2.1 - Improved and tested forest models for case study regions. Project deliverable.