Global and local climate changes, disturbances and evolving needs for forest services affect forest development. Models are necessary to evaluate these changes and their consequences for forest services, national forest policy and international reporting.
Among other things, we model timber stock, biomass and carbon from data of the National Forest Inventory NFI.Using empirical models derived from this data, we then simulate the future evolution of forests and their services.
Example applications include the forest indicators of the Greenhouse Gas Inventory for determining carbon sources and sinks in Swiss forests (GHGI - see projects), Swiss timber utilisation potential (Stadelmann et al. 2016, SZF), and studies on the CO2 effects of the Swiss forestry and timber industry (Taverna et al. 2007, update in progress).
In the Resource Analysis group, we run these models, keep them scientifically up to date, and make them fit for future practical requirements. We publish research results in the areas of inventory statistics, afforestation (Rohner et al. 2015; Rohner et al. 2016, Mina et al. 2017), forest modelling and forest services (Temperli et al. 2017a, 2017b) in international journals (see research group resource analysis).