NextStand 2.0: Regional forest landscape simulation linking human agency, complex governance, and ecosystem processes

For informed land-use decisions and policies, it is crucial to understand their consequences in real landscapes and over foreseeable time-scales. We have developed a realistic version of the forest landscape model NextStand in R, which supports spatially explicit forecasts for forest stands over regional scales. Compared to its first ’clear-cut simulator’ version, version 2.0 simulates multiple types of forest cuttings and their consequences (including partial cuts), timber stock volumes, cutting prioritizations based on different profitabilities of forests, and enables standard scenario input to consider a wide range of alternative environmental restrictions to cuttings across landscape. We exemplify model performance and outputs based on two realistic scenarios in Estonian forests by 2050, which enable assessing most criteria of sustainable forest management for the whole country or its parts. The scenarios indicate that national growing stocks will decline and, in production forests, stand densities will decline even at current intensities of forest cuttings. The model can be developed into a Decision Support Tool for forest and environmental policies given adequate spatial data, regional parameterization, and attention to the model limitations and uncertainties.