In December 2022, ForestPaths issued its first co-funded publication: the EFISCEN-Space 1.0 model documentation and manual, published by Wageningen Environmental Research. EFISCEN-Space is among the existing models which ForestPaths will enhance as part of its novel integrated assessment framework in order to capture updated European forest composition and structure information, include disturbance impacts and better address diverse forest management practices. The new publication gives a detailed description of the model, including the history, theoretic background, code implementation, a verification and evaluation chapter and future development directions of the model, and also includes a user guide.

Several forest resource projection models already exist. However, due to the need to model a wider variety of management systems and forest situations, and at a higher spatial and temporal detail compared to existing models, the researchers from Wageningen Environmental Research identified the need for a new simulation model. This development was also facilitated by the increasingly available Natural Forest Inventory (NFI) data. Different concepts were tested over time, resulting in the current version of EFISCEN-Space. The new publication summarises it as:

‘The core of EFISCEN-Space is the geographically explicit modelling of forest development in Europe at the forest stand level, based on empirical NFI tree-wise plot data, driven by environmental datasets that have a pan-European coverage, under realistic forest management conditions. The functionality is or can be extended to cover aspects such as carbon in biomass, soil and harvested wood products, biodiversity & ecosystem services indicators and economic indicators. EFISCEN-Space is modular, such that depending on the aim of the application and resources available, modules can operate on different levels of detail, or can be excluded if not relevant. EFISCEN-Space is not intended to replace existing national models, but should be able to simulate the forest of any European country in a consistent way.’

EFISCEN-Space is continuously developed and this report describes its state (referred to as EFISCEN-Space 1.0) as of July 2022, which features a full increment model, a full biomass model, a coupled soil carbon model and cost estimation of harvest activities.

Read the full publication here.