A climate change adaptive dynamic programming approach to optimize eucalypt stand management scheduling: a Portuguese application.

The aim of this paper is to present approaches to optimize stand-level, short-rotation coppice management planning, taking into account uncertainty in stand growth due to climate change. The focus is on addressing growth uncertainty through a range of climate scenarios so that an adaptive capacity may be possible and the vulnerability of the stand to climate change may be reduced. The optimization encompasses finding both the harvest age in each cycle and the number of coppice cycles within a full rotation that maximize net present revenue. The innovation lies in the combination of the process-based model (Glob3PG) with two dynamic programming (DP) approaches. The former is able to project growth of eucalypt stands under climate change scenarios. The innovative approaches are thus influential to define the management policy (e.g., stool thinning, number of coppice cycles, and cycle length) that maximizes net present revenue taking into account uncertainty in forest growth due to climate change. In both approaches, the state of the system is defined by the number of years since plantation, whereas DP stages are defined by the cumulative number of harvests. The first approach proposes the optimal policy under each climate change scenario at each state. The second approach addresses further situations when the climate scenario is unknown at the beginning of the planning horizon. Both help address uncertainty in an adaptive framework, as a set of readily available options is proposed for each scenario. Results of an application to a typical Eucalyptus globulus Labill. stand in central Portugal are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]