Resource management planning and ecological intensification to address climate challenges in French forestry

The talk illustrates two aspects of reshaping forest management in order to tackle the pressures of climate change and address the combined challenges of adaptation, mitigation and ecosystem service regulation : (i) resource management planning has to put more emphasis on coordinated, multi-scale procedures, diversification, tree planting, ecosystem resilience support, investment selection, logistics and information management ; (ii) ecological intensification, in the case of temperate forests, may be viewed as a more efficient use of natural and human-induced cycles of matter, energy and information in ecosystems as well as in the emerging bioeconomy. Through questioning how to implement management change in a context of uncertainty, stronger constraints and higher and more diverse expectations, ecological intensification for forests cannot be confused with naturalness, and contradicts European concepts of « close-to-nature forestry » in many regards. It is more productive to see ecological intensification as investing to improve the monitoring of different critical fluxes and the efficiency of their use (carbon, water, nutrients, products-coproducts-byproducts, species-genetic resources, plants, fertilizers, machines, information, etc…). For European foresters, making a clear distinction between ecology and imitation of nature will be a fundamental challenge to successfully achieve the present transitio