DIVERSE: Viewing Forest Resilience as a Network, Not a Collection of Stands 

Summary from: Solarik et al. (2026). “DIVERSE: Implementing the Functional Complex Network Approach Alongside Climate-Smart Forestry in Canada,” presented at the CIF-IFC 2025 conference.

Since the 1990s, sustainable forest management in Canada has sought to balance timber supply, carbon storage, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, social values, and Indigenous rights and interests. However, global changes are increasing the frequency, severity, and unpredictability of droughts, wildfires, insect outbreaks, and other disturbances. As a result, trees planted today must survive and grow for decades under climatic and ecological conditions that are increasingly uncertain.

DIVERSE was launched in response to this challenge. This pan-Canadian research partnership brings together more than forty researchers, seven universities, and numerous forestry, government, and Indigenous partners. Its objective is to test a new approach to strengthening forest through the functional complex network (FCN) approach across 22 managed forest landscapes in six provinces, covering more than 20 million hectares.

The central idea: resilience is not only a stand-level property

Many forest adaptation strategies focus on individual stands: Which species should be planted? Which seed provenance should be selected? How should stand composition or structure be modified?

The FCN approach broadens this perspective by viewing the forest landscape as a network. Each stand is treated as a node connected to its neighbouring through ecological processes, particularly the potential movement and dispersal of seed. This network perspective introduces five important properties for evaluating landscape resilience:

• Functional diversity: the range of ecological strategies present within a stand, including differences in shade tolerance, rooting depth, drought tolerance, and other functional traits.
• Functional redundancy: if multiple species can perform similar ecological functions. This redundancy provides a form of ecological insurance if one species declines or is lost.
• Connectivity: the potential for seeds to move between stands, supporting the recolonize of disturbed areas.
• Centrality: stands that are especially important within the network because they can serve as sources of regeneration for multiple stands across the landscape.
• Modularity: barriers in the landscape, i.e. the extend to which the landscape is divided it into semi-independent sections. Greater modularity may help limit the spread of a disturbances (fire, epidemic) across the broader landscape.

The Six Themes of DIVERSE

The DIVERSE project is organized around six interconnected themes that move from assessment and planning to implementation and operational learning.

Theme 1 — Forest Vulnerability: Develop indices describing species sensitivity to drought, migration failure, wildfire, and regeneration failure using functional trait information for 77 Canadian tree species.

Theme 2 — Identification of Suitable Tree Species & Seed Sources: Identify the tree species and seed provenances expected to be best adapted to current and future climatic conditions in each region.

Theme 3 — Functional Complex Networks: Calculate FCN properties for each study site and map intervention priorities.

Theme 4 —Scenario Testing with Forest Landscape Simulation Models: Compare business-as-usual (BAU), climate-smart forestry (CSF), and FCN strategies using the LANDIS-II model, over time horizons of up to 200 years.

Theme 5 — Socio-Economic Feasibility, Governance, and Implementation Pathways: Assess the costs, operational constraints, governance requirements, and conditions that may influence the feasibility and social acceptability of different management strategies.

Theme 6 — Field Experiments and Operational Learning: Establish operational demonstration sites to test the preferred silvicultural treatments identified through the preceding themes and evaluate their implementation under field conditions.

What DIVERSE offers forest managers

A framework for answering three practical questions:

1. Which stands are particularly vulnerable because they lack functional diversity and redundancy?
2. Which stands serve as critical sources for regeneration and therefore warrant protection, restoration, or targeted species enrichment?
3. How can landscape modularity be increased to reduce the risks of disturbance spreading widely without compromising the connectivity needed for seed dispersal and forest recovery?

An approach that builds on existing forestry data

The FCN approach is designed to work with information that is already commonly available within the forest sector or can be obtained relatively easily. This may include forest inventory data, vegetation and forest cover maps, information on the functional traits of local species, and realistic assumptions about seed dispersal capacity.

DIVERSE is examining how these data can be standardized and incorporated into existing forest planning processes and operational planning cycles.

A practical pathway from diagnosis to adaptive management

Box 2 of the article outlines a concrete sequence for integrating DIVERSE outputs into forest planning:

1. Define the management context and objectives;
2. Diagnose current conditions (sensitivity, exposure, adaptive capacity);
3. Expand the adaptation portfolio by identifying climate-adapted species and provenances;
4. Use the FCN approach to spatially prioritize interventions;
5. Compare BAU/CSF/FCN strategies through simulation;
6. Assess socioeconomic and governance feasibility ;
7. Implement, monitor, and adjust.

FCN is a decision-making framework, not a silvicultural system

The FCN approach is not a silviculture system in itself. Like Climate-Smart Forestry, it is a decision-making framework that can inform a range of management actions.

Depending on local objectives and conditions, these actions may include:

• Selecting species and provenances adapted to current and future climates;
• Diversifying stand composition and structure;
• Conducting enrichment plantings; and
• Spatially reconfiguring harvesting and planting operations to increase connectivity and modularity.

The appropriate combination of actions will depend on the ecological context, management objectives, operational constraints, and projected disturbance risks within each landscape.

Making trade-offs explicit

Landscape connectivity can support forest recovery by facilitating seed dispersal and recolonization following disturbance. However, connectivity may also accelerate the spread of wildfire, insect outbreaks, or pathogens when it creates continuous corridors of fuel or susceptible hosts. Conversely, landscapes that are excessively compartmentalized may restrict seed movement and slow ecological recovery.

The FCN approach does not eliminate this trade-off. Instead, it provides a framework for identifying and evaluating it explicitly. The objective is to maintain sufficient functional connectivity to support recovery while promoting enough modularity to reduce the risk of disturbances cascading across an entire landscape.

In Summary

DIVERSE is moving into its operational phase. Current work includes completing vulnerability assessments, identifying priority locations for FCN-informed interventions, comparing management strategies through simulation, evaluating their socioeconomic and governance feasibility, and validating selected approaches through operational field trials.

The project will produce vulnerability maps, species-specific climate suitability layers, FCN maps, decision-support tools, and monitoring protocols. These resources will be progressively made available through the DIVERSE project portal, subject to the data-sharing agreements established with project partners: (https://diverseproject.uqo.ca/)

Pour consulter l'article dans son intégralité, cliquez sur le lien suivant : doi.org/10.5558/tfc2026-022