Development of forest simulation tools for assessing the impact of different management strategies and climatic changes on wood production and carbon sequestration for Eucalyptus in Portugal

Doutoramento em Engenharia Florestal e dos Recursos Florestais - Instituto Superior de AgronomiaThe present work had as main objective developing tools capable of simulating the evolution of Eucalyptus globulus forests in Portugal taking into account disturbance factors, such as market demands, hazards occurrence, land use changes, forest management and/or climate changes. Some conceptual work was done concerning the definition of different forest management alternatives while at the same time the E. globulus current management was described. SIMPLOT, a regional simulator based on national forest inventory plots was developed and validated. This simulation tool, mainly driven by wood and biomass demands, takes into account the occurrence of hazards, land use changes and the changes between different forest management alternatives allowing accessing its long-term impacts, namely on wood production and carbon sequestration. Some of the empirical growth models available for this species in Portugal were integrated into this simulator. However, the need to forecast the growth of highly stocked stands managed for bioenergy lead to the development of a new model. In order to account for climate changes, a process-based model was required. Therefore, the applicability of 3PG process-based model at a regional scale was tested for planted and coppice stands. Two forest level simulators, 3PG-Out+ and GLOBULUS, were developed along this study