Research Themes

6 Main Research Themes

The DIVERSE Project is separated into six comprehensive research themes, each providing critical insights on how humanity can help Canadian forests adapt to a changing world.

Theme 1

Forest Resilience and Vulnerability

What global change, Canadian forests are likely to experience environmental variations, including more frequent, severe, and long-lasting disturbances. Not all species will respond equally.

Besides, if disturbances are too frequent and/or too intense, trees might not have to ability to cope with them, therefore making forest ecosystems more vulnerable. That’s why DIVERSE seeks to improve our knowledge about forest vulnerability to global change.

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Theme 2

Identification and Selection of Suitable Tree Species to Grow

Different trees like different conditions : warm, cold, dry, wet, shaded or sunny. Every tree has its preferences and capacities. But with global changes, not all trees will be adapted to what their habitat becomes.

Changes in climate, biotic and abiotic disturbances are expected to impact the health, vigor and reproductive capacity of some tree species. This could lead to local or large-scale die offs and to decreases in resilience (see theme 1).

Because of this, the DIVERSE project will aim to identify tree species that are expected to be better suited to the global changes that are affecting Canada.

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Theme 3

Functional Complex Networks

Functional Complex Networks are a particular way to visualize forests, where forests exchange the diversity of the functions of their trees between each other in space and time. If we want to help forests adapt to the future, we will need to assess these networks as they currently are, and try to improve them by facilitating these exchanges of functional diversity between them. That is what Theme 3 is all about, as it will produce maps of such networks, along with different measures associated with them that will guide future management decisions in our research sites.

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Theme 4

Evaluation of various forest management approaches under global stressors

The DIVERSE project is about changing forestry as we do it today to help forests adapt to the future. But how can we be sure of how forests will evolve under different management strategies ? That’s where computer models come in : thanks to them, we can simulate how forests evolve on large temporal and spatial scales, over hundreds of years and millions of hectares. We will design different scenarios to test out new forest management strategies, and see how they impact the forests of several of our research sites in the future.

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Theme 5

Socio-Economic Conditions and Governance

In Canada, forests are managed by a complex group of stakeholders : provincial and federal authorities, companies, NGOs, first nations, and private individuals that all enjoy the many benefits humans can derive from forests. Each of them can have a different vision of the risks forest will face in the future, but also different priorities which might make the implementation of the new management strategies proposed by DIVERSE difficult. In this theme, we’ll explore the social and governance-related obstacles and opportunities that these new management strategies will face when it will be time to implement them.

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Theme 6

Implementation of alternative silvicultural treatments and multi-species plantations

We can predict a lot with computers these days; but in the end, we still need to listen to nature in all of its complexity to really be sure of what we’re doing. This is why we will implement field test sites in several of our research sites to study the effect of the management practices that DIVERSE will recommend to help forests adapt to the future. These sites will become both study areas, and also demonstration environments where these methods and their results will be shown to the world.

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