Modelling and assessing forest ecosystem services at small region scales

Abstract

With 16.5 million hectares, the forest plays a major role in France, providing many provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem services. The evaluation of these ecosystem services and their evolution under various socio-economic scenarios represents a major challenge for scientists and decision makers, especially at small region scales for which national data or indicators cannot be used. In recent years significant progress has been made towards a better evaluation of ecosystem services. These advances are usually based on the joint use of databases, remote sensing tools and forest dynamics models applied at different scales. In this article, we discuss the advantages and limitations of these approaches using three examples dealing with the Isère French department. These examples highlight some technical and scientific issues to be overcome in the future. A possible way of progress in the short term seems to lie in the construction of a processing chain that explicitly couples the acquisition of remote sensing data, the initialization of simulations using forest dynamics models and the evaluation ecosystem services by adapted linker functions.