Management and renewal of fir stands under threatby climate change

The issue forming the topic worked on within the framework of the European Climadapt project by the ONF –the French national forestry commission- involved the mountainous forested areas of the Mediterranean hinterland; specifically, the management and renewal of fir stands threatened by climate change. It has become clear that while fir forests constitute an outstandingly rich economic and ecological resource, their mortality observed over recent years has highlighted the fragility of such ecosystems when faced with climatic events and the difficulty forest professionals have in trying to preserve them. For the project, three experimental protocols were set up in the south of France to test different methods of management in real-life conditions. The first involved low-density forestry management of existing fir stands with the aim of improving their resistance to drought. The second protocol called for the plantation for purposes of comparison of Atlas cedar of four different provenances as a replacement for a former fir stand that had been decimated by the drought conditions prevailing from 2003 to 2007. In the context, it was considered that the Atlas cedar was the most promising replacement species. The third was a try-out of forestry management in a low-density cedar stand considered to represent what is likely to be the situation of fir stands in a few decades’ time. Obviously, the results will only become available after a long period of monitoring, much longer than the three years of the ForClimadapt project