Forest Research: Supporting change in management practice

Objectives: To assess whether current tree species choice will remain appropriate with climate change by considering the risk of damaging threshold moisture deficits being exceeded. The study aims to assess if and where drought sensitive species e.g. Sitka spruce, are likely to be affected by high summer moisture deficits (moisture deficits exceeding 180 mm).

• How they used UKCP09 dummy data

The impact of the change in future rainfall was calculated from the underlying data associated with the maps of UK summer rainfall for the time periods and probability levels specified alongside. Post-launch this data is available as the CDF data.

As evaporation data was not supplied with the dummy data, the 1961–1990 baseline evaporation data was used to represent both the baseline and the future climate.

New maps were produced from a GIS analysis, and were used to show the future regional distribution of areas equal to or exceeding a moisture deficit of 180 mm.

The probability maps of moisture deficit were combined to show the distribution of the likelihood of areas considered too dry to plant drought sensitive tree species in the future climate.

• What could they do next?

• Using the resultant maps, forest managers could assess the degree of risk they are willing to accept in considering planting drought sensitive tree species for their area of management. 
• Strategic forest planners could also use the information to guide incentives to encourage climate change adaptation in tree species choice and in alternative forest management systems.

• What they learnt about UKCP09

• Spatially explicit maps of change are very effective in conveying important information to forest managers about the impacts of climate change and the urgency for adaptive management.
• They would have liked evaporation data for the moisture deficit analysis.
• There was a difficulty in registering baseline and future projections because the location of the origin of the gridded data and the map projection used for the rainfall grids were not given in the metadata block.

• Contact details: Duncan Ray, Ecology Division, Forest Research

• Download the full report (pdf, 80 KB)
• Forest Research website
• Forest Research Scotland website 
• Forest Research Wales website