Growth Trends in Swedish forests under Management and Climate change – Historical and Future Perspectives

photo of Dr. Alex appiah Mensah

Abstract

To achieve global targets on mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, information about forest growth changes is essential, especially for the forests in higher latitudes. Important questions regarding growth are to what extent management and climate change have influenced it, and how it might respond in the future. Current information about forest growth changes is also essential to determine the forest resource capacity to supply raw materials, to enhance biodiversity and to estimate the potentials for future carbon balance. Using empirical data from long-term monitoring systems such as the National Forest Inventory and permanent plots in Long-term Forest Experimental sites, this presentation highlights in one hand, the impacts of changed forestry practice and environmental conditions on forest growth changes, and at the other hand, the short- and the long-term potentials for carbon storage in forests and harvested wood products via alternative forest management strategies in Sweden.

Biography

Dr. Alex Appiah Mensah is a researcher in empirical forest modelling at the Department of Forest Resource Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). He has a Ph.D. in forestry (2022) from the same department. Alex’s research works span broadly on forest biometrics, with focus on growth trends, site productivity and inference of forest biomass within the frameworks of design-based, model-based and hybrid inference to support SLU’s environmental monitoring as well as practical forestry operations. He works mostly with data from national forest inventory, forest experiments and remote sensing.