Accounting for economic drivers in forest modelling: a spatially explicit bio-economic model of the french forest sector.

Summary Given the importance of anthropogenic determinants in forest ecosystems within Europe, the objective of the FFSM++ model is to link the evidence arising from biological models with socio-economic determinants, where the expected returns of forest investments represent the main drivers. An inventory-based forest dynamic model is hence coupled with a partial equilibrium market module and a micro-based management one in a national level French Forest Sector Model (FFSM++). The objectives of this paper are: (a) to demonstrate the importance of the interactions between climatic drivers and management strategies that such integrated approach is able to capture, with a particular focus on the effects of employing a spatial framework (b) to address the implementation of such linkage between a (non linear programming) market-module and the rest of the model where an object-oriented/agent-based approach is used. In particular an application is proposed for spatialising the forest growth rate and long-term scenarios (until 2100) are run to examine the effects on forest dynamics, and notably the interaction with forest management strategies, of several climate change scenarios.