Scientific considerations and challenges for addressing cumulative effects in forest landscapes in Canada

Abstract

Traditionally, forest management has focused on forestry-related practices whereas other industries have been managed separately. Forest management requires the integration of all natural resource development activities, along with other anthropogenic and natural forest disturbances (e.g., climate change, pollution, wildfire, pest disturbance) to understand how human activities can change forested ecosystems. The term cumulative effects has been used to describe these attempts to integrate all disturbances to develop an understanding of past, current, and future impacts on environmental, social, and economic components of the system. In this review, we focus on the science required to understand the past, current, and future impacts of the cumulative effects of anthropogenic and natural disturbances on forested ecosystems or their components. We have primarily focused on the terrestrial system with an emphasis on northern forests in Canada. Our paper is not intended to be a comprehensive review of all cumulative effects science but a synthesis of the challenges and approaches currently being used. Central repositories were identified as an approach to deal with issues of availability of remotely sensed data on anthropogenic and natural disturbances. Data integration projects, open data, and well-designed large-scale data collection efforts are needed to provide sufficient data on environmental responses to cumulative effects. As well, large-scale integrated, modularized ecosystem models are needed to bring stressor and environmental response data together to explore responses to, and interactions between, multiple stressors to project these effects into the future and to identify future data collection needs.