Climate Analogues for Temperate European Forests to Raise Silvicultural Evidence Using Twin Regions

Climate analogues provide forestry practice with empirical evidence of how forests are managed in “twin” regions, i.e., regions where the current climate is comparable to the expected future climate at a site of interest. As the twin regions and their silvicultural evidence change with each climate scenario and model, we focus our investigation on how the uncertainty in future climate affects tree species prevalence. We calculate the future climate from 2000 to 2100 for three ensemble variants of the mild (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5) and hard (RCP 8.5) climate scenarios. We determine climatic distances between the future climate of our site of interest ‘Roth’ and the current climate in Europe, generating maps with twin regions from 2000 to 2100. From forest inventories in these twin regions we trace how the prevalence of 23 major tree species changes. We realize that it is not the ‘ how ’ but the ‘ how fast ’ species’ prevalence changes that differs between the scenario variants. We use this finding to develop a categorization of species groups that integrates the uncertainty in future climate. Twin regions provide further information on silvicultural practices, pest management, product chains etc.