Balancing productivity and reliability in fire-prone boreal forests

Forests provide a range of ecosystem services, from wood production and carbon sequestration to biodiversity conservation and recreational use. Given the rising frequency of disturbances such as fires, it is important to ensure wood production remains reliable, while also maintaining other ecosystem services. We explore how management decisions interact with probability of forest fires in boreal forests to determine trade-offs between productivity – defined as annual wood harvest – and its reliability in boreal forests subject to fire disturbance. Reliability is operationalized through two complementary aspects: temporal stability of annual harvest, and the frequency and magnitude of harvest falling below a minimum acceptable level. Using a landscape model that combines tree growth, self-thinning and fire-caused mortality, and forest management, we test how productivity and reliability are impacted by four factors: mortality, fire frequency, tree species, and site fertility. We find that a trade-off between high productivity and high reliability is common, and becomes more pronounced with higher fire frequency, planting of spruce, and increased site fertility. At the landscape scale, prioritizing high productivity in certain stands comes at the expense of neighboring stands, decreasing both their productivity, and the overall reliability of the wood production in the landscape.