Balancing disturbance risk and ecosystem service provisioning in Swiss mountain forests: an increasing challenge under climate change

Climate change severely affects mountain forests and their ecosystem services, e.g., by altering disturbance regimes. Increasing timber harvest (INC) via a close-to-nature forestry may offer a mitigation strategy to reduce disturbance predisposition. However, little is known about the efficiency of this strategy at the scale of forest enterprises and potential trade-offs with biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES). We applied a decision support system which accounts for disturbance predisposition and BES indicators to evaluate the effect of different harvest intensities and climate change scenarios on windthrow and bark beetle predisposition in a mountain forest enterprise in Switzerland. Simulations were carried out from 2010 to 2100 under historic climate and climate change scenarios (RCP4.5, RCP8.5). In terms of BES, biodiversity (structural and tree species diversity, deadwood amount) as well as timber production, recreation (visual attractiveness), carbon sequestration, and protection against gravitational hazards (rockfall, avalanche and landslides) were assessed. The INC strategy reduced disturbance predisposition to windthrow and bark beetles. However, the mitigation potential for bark beetle disturbance was relatively small (− 2.4%) compared to the opposite effect of climate change (+ 14% for RCP8.5). Besides, the INC strategy increased the share of broadleaved species and resulted in a synergy with recreation and timber production, and a trade-off with carbon sequestration and protection function. Our approach emphasized the disproportionally higher disturbance predisposition under the RCP8.5 climate change scenario, which may threaten currently unaffected mountain forests. Decision support systems accounting for climate change, disturbance predisposition, and BES can help coping with such complex planning situations. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-022-02015-w.