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Europe's forests provide vital habitat for biodiversity and essential ecosystem services whose provision must be sustained or enhanced over the coming century. However, the potential to secure or increase forest ecosystem services, while securing the habitat requirements of taxa remains unclear, especially within the context of uncertain climate and socio-economic developments. To tease out the associated trade-offs and synergies, we used 10 case study landscapes within nine countries throughout Europe. Starting with the current status of the forests in the case study landscapes, we simulated forest development 100 years into the future. Simulations were embedded in three combined climate and socio-economic frame scenarios based on global and European policies which varied in their climate change mitigation efficiency. Scenarios were translated into country specific projections of climate variables, and resultant demands for wood products. Forest management regimes were projected to vary in response to these scenarios at local scales. The specific combinations of alternative forest management practices were based on parallel research and input from local forest stakeholders. For each case study, a specific forest growth simulator was used. In general, the climate scenarios applied did not cause fundamentally different ecosystem service outputs at the case study level. Our results revealed almost no reduction in outcomes for biodiversity indicators with an increase in wood production, and in some cases synergistic results occurred when diversity was actively promoted as part of the management concept. Net carbon uptake was not strongly correlated with biodiversity, indicating that biodiversity-friendly forest management doesn't need to curtail carbon sequestration. Notably, we obtained heterogeneous results for the relation between sustainable wood production and net carbon uptake. Most scenarios resulted in a more or less reduced net carbon uptake over the long term, often due to stand age class distribution shifts. Levels of sustainable wood production varied widely during the simulation period, from significant increases (Sweden, Lithuania) to minor changes (Slovakia, Turkey) and slight decreases (Ireland, Netherlands). We place our results within the larger context of European forest policy and the challenges of simulating and contrasting forest biodiversity and the ecosystem services that societies depend on.

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) has become an important pillar of modern forest management, and one way to evaluate the sustainability of forestry is to assess long-term supply of ecosystem services (ESs) indicators. The concept of sustainability also has come to include adapting to climate change and the associated dynamic timber markets. This study aims to: (1) incorporate several ESs indicators in a Forest Management Decision Support System (FMDSS) that can deal with climate change and dynamic timber markets; and (2) analyse the impact that intensified forest management, resulting from global change scenarios that represent different levels of climate change mitigation efforts, will have on forest ES indicators in the west of Ireland. A linear programming model that optimized Net Present Value (NPV) from mill-gate sales was previously developed in Remsoft Woodstock, a DSS framework used for strategic forest planning around the world. This Woodstock model was modified to include the effects of global scenarios that include climate change and dynamic timber prices. This model was further developed to include indicators for five ESs (carbon storage in the forest as well as in harvested wood products and carbon substitution, windthrow risk, biodiversity, water quality, and cultural values), to assess the impacts of these global scenarios on the forest landscape and the sustainability of forest management. The ES indicator values were mainly linked to forest age, forest type, and yield tables, and their inclusion in the FMDSS had almost no impact on total model run times. Intensified forest clearfelling, as a result of increasing timber prices associated with most global scenarios, led to increased phosphor emissions to waterbodies, and reductions in windthrow risk and carbon storage. The global scenarios only resulted in minor differences in the indicator values for biodiversity and cultural values. Besides the global scenarios, recent forest policy development and the poor soil conditions in the study area impacted on the results. The developed system, with its innovative method to incorporate climate change and associated market dynamics, could be applied to other forest landscapes in Ireland and Europe, or indeed by any forest company or organization that uses Remsoft Woodstock.