Developing Adaptive Approaches to Forest Harvest Management in Boreal Alaska under Rapid Climate Change

The Alaska boreal forest has experienced some of the greatest magnitude of climate-driven change of any forest region, and adaptive management approaches are required in current management and decisions. Forest harvest management has relied heavily on natural regeneration, which generally was successful. Most harvests were small and mature white spruce near roads. Wildfires were small to very large and occurred broadly. Post-harvest regeneration is successful, but on vulnerable warm dry sites, failure is likely to occur soon. Boreal forest in some landscape positions will be resilient to additional warming or invading tundra. We offer a framework and suggest options for developing adaptive forest harvest management. The main options under climate change include (1) maintaining current species where feasible, (2) maintaining a forest landscape of any type, and (3) monitoring biome shift. We identify examples of management actions and gathered research appropriate to each of these options.