Forests are subjected to ecological and socio-economic forces of change, interacting in complex ways. To cope with these changes, forest management consists of integrating socio-cultural, ecological, and economic considerations in an analytic and systemic way. In this vein, social-ecological systems (SES) frameworks have been developed to help analyzing key factors that derive the dynamics of such complex adaptive systems [1]. However, a research gap exists with regard to understanding how forest management implemented impacts the overall forest system.
We build a model based on a diagnosis to analyze the Quatre-Montagne forest, located in the South-East of France. This diagnosis, based on the SES framework [2] and the robustness framework [3], shows that infrastructures play an important role in mediating how the forest is exploited, especially roads in offering accessibility to the forest. The model, based on this diagnosis, simulates the dynamics of building and maintaining the roads from an infrastructure provider’s point of view. We then, study the effect of the trade-off between building and maintaining the forest roads on the functioning of timber production in the forest as well as on other forest functions (tourism, nature conservation, etc…). The presentation will focus on the development of a mathematical model for forest roads, as highlighted by the SES framework analysis, that operationalizes the robustness framework to offer a diagnosis of the effect of investment trade-off between building and maintaining forest roads.
Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) under the VIRGO project (ANR-16-CE03-0003) and the region of Auvergne. Moreover, this research was conducted on the Long-Term Socio-Ecosystem Research platform LTSER “Zone Atelier Alpes”, a member of the ILTER-Europe network.
