Application of multicriteria spatial analysis for assessing the vulnerability of forest ecosystems to climate change: Case study of Maamora forest

• Koffi Dodji Noumonvi ^[1]
  1. [1] ENFI-Morocco
• Localización: XI young researchers meeting on conservation and sustainable use of forest systems / coord. por Elena Hidalgo Rodríguez, Francisco Javier Dorado Reyes, Ainhoa Iñiguez Soto, Diego A. Damián Carrión, Samuel Gato Martín, Guillermo Jové Alcalde, Raúl Arcadio Fernández González, 2017, ISBN 978-84-617-9574-1, pág. 48
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Once completely covered with cork oak, half of Maamora forest has been reforested with other species, mainly Acacia, Eucalyptus and Pine. This is the result of many management strategies that have been called upon since 1951. The progressive conversion of the forest is happening after many regeneration failures of the original species (cork oak) faced by forest managers in many parts of the forest. We consider that climate change might have something to do with this.Assuming that the consideration of the vulnerability of forest ecosystems to climate change would help in future management strategies, this work considered 4 changing factors namelybiophysical, climatic, anthropogenic and silvicultural factors to assess the vulnerability. Each of these factors has been mapped considering its individual components. The 4 groups of factors have been weighted and integrated, using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for the different weights, to have the synthetic vulnerability of forest ecosystems to climate change initially in 2010 as reference and then in 2045 after projecting changing factors and considering the RCPscenarios 4.5 (1) said optimistic and 8.5 (2) said pessimistic. The resulting vulnerability map shows that the most continental forest ecosystems are the most vulnerable to climate change, justifying why cork oak almost disappeared in the cantons D and E of the forest. This effect of continentality is more noticed in the predicted vulnerability at the horizon 2045. It should be notedthat the synthetic vulnerability of no group of the forest is null. The groups with low vulnerability accounted for 53% of the forest area in 2010 compared with only 11% in 2045 with the first scenario. Every group would become moderately or highly vulnerable to climate change with the second scenario in 2045.