| 1. |
- Blennow, Kristina, et al.
(författare)
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Implementing storm damage in a dynamic vegetation model for regional applications in Sweden
- 2012
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Ingår i: Ecological Modelling. - : Elsevier BV. - 0304-3800 .- 1872-7026. ; 247, s. 71-82
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Wind is the dominant agent of damage in forests in Western Europe. Traditional wind-damage models calculate a probability for damage or a critical wind speed at which damage occurs. However, in a dynamic vegetation model actual damage to stands and individual trees is needed to get a dynamical progression of the vegetation. We present a prototype for a new approach to modelling forest wind damage at the regional scale, which we incorporate within a dynamic vegetation model. The approach is based on knowledge from both empirical and mechanical models and calculates the damaged fraction of a cohort based on wind load and a sensitivity that depends on the current physical state and history of the cohort in relation to the ecosystem. The modelling concept has been developed, calibrated and evaluated for Swedish conditions but can be applicable to other similar areas with minor modification. Because of the stochastic nature of local wind load and the difficulty of describing the stand-level exposure, the ability to explain observed damage at stand level was low. Regional level variation in damage, which more depends on the wind load, was however explained reasonably well (R-2 = 0.43). We suggest that this is a useful concept for evaluating alternatives of forest management under different climate scenarios in the process of adaptation to future storm-damage risks. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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| 2. |
- Blennow, Kristina
(författare)
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Evaluating the Local Climate Impacts Profile tool for assessing local impacts of extreme weather events
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Geography and Natural Disasters. - : OMICS Publishing Group. - 2167-0587. ; 4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The climate change adaptation tool Local Climate Impacts Profile (LCLIP), developed and previously widely usedin the UK, was systematically evaluated in terms of its transferability to Sweden and its usefulness as a catalyst forawareness-raising and action with respect to climate change adaptation. The tool includes scoping, media trawl,interviews and reporting and was applied in three Swedish municipalities. It was found that after some adjustment,the tool can be applied successfully under Swedish conditions. The municipalities involved found the results useful forstimulating local adaptation work. However, the municipalities concluded that LCLIP is primarily a beginner's tool thatcan be applied at a low cost and that other, more costly investigations on vulnerability to extreme weather typically needto be conducted for successful adaptation to climate change at municipal level. An advantage of the LCLIP tool is thatit involves civil servants from all departments in the municipality and thus the resulting vulnerability discussions alsoinvolve departments dealing with ‘soft' issues, such as administration and care.
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| 3. |
- Blennow, Kristina
(författare)
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Simulating wind disturbance impacts on forest landscapes: Tree-level heterogeneity matters
- 2014
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Ingår i: Environmental Modelling and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 1364-8152 .- 1873-6726. ; 51, s. 1-11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Wind is the most detrimental disturbance agent in Europe's forest ecosystems. In recent years, disturbance frequency and severity have been increasing at continental scale, a trend that is expected to continue under future anthropogenic climate change. Disturbance management is thus increasingly important for sustainable stewardship of forests, and requires tools to evaluate the effects of management alternatives and climatic changes on disturbance risk and ecosystem services. We here present a process-based model of wind disturbance impacts on forest ecosystems, integrated into the dynamic landscape simulation model iLand. The model operates at the level of individual trees and simulates wind disturbance events iteratively, i.e., dynamically accounting for changes in forest structure and newly created edges during the course of a storm. Both upwind gap size and local shelter from neighboring trees are considered in this regard, and critical wind speeds for uprooting and stem breakage are distinguished. The simulated disturbance size, pattern, and severity are thus emergent properties of the model. We evaluated the new simulation tool against satellite-derived data on the impact of the storm Gudrun (January 2005) on a 1391 ha forest landscape in south central Sweden. Both the overall damage percentage (observation: 21.7%, simulation: 21.4%) as well as the comparison of spatial damage patterns showed good correspondence between observations and predictions (prediction accuracy: 60.4%) if the full satellite-derived structural and spatial heterogeneity of the landscape was taken into account. Neglecting within-stand heterogeneity in forest conditions, i.e., the state-of-the-art in many stand-level risk models, resulted in a considerable underestimation of simulated damage, supporting the notion that tree-level complexity matters for assessing and modeling large-scale disturbances. A sensitivity analysis further showed that changes in wind speed and soil freezing could have potentially large impacts on disturbed area and patch size. The model presented here is available as open source. It can be used to study the effects of different silvicultural systems and future climates on wind risk, as well as to quantify the impacts of wind disturbance on ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration. It thus contributes to improving our capacity to address changing disturbance regimes in ecosystem management. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 4. |
- Blennow, Kristina, et al.
(författare)
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Societal impacts of storm damage
- 2013
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Ingår i: Living with Storm Damage to Forests. What science can tell us. - 9789525980097 ; :3, s. 70-77
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Blennow, Kristina
(författare)
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Simulating damage for wind storms in the land surface model ORCHIDEE-CAN (revision 4262)
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoscientific Model Development. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 1991-959X .- 1991-9603. ; 11, s. 771-791
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Earth system models (ESMs) are currently the most advanced tools with which to study the interactions among humans, ecosystem productivity, and the climate. The inclusion of storm damage in ESMs has long been hampered by their big-leaf approach, which ignores the canopy structure information that is required for process-based wind throw modelling. Recently the big-leaf assumptions in the large-scale land surface model ORCHIDEE-CAN were replaced by a three-dimensional description of the canopy structure. This opened the way to the integration of the processes from the small-scale wind damage risk model Forest-GALES into ORCHIDEE-CAN. The integration of Forest-GALES into ORCHIDEE-CAN required, however, developing numerically efficient solutions to deal with (1) landscape heterogeneity, i.e. account for newly established forest edges for the parameterization of gusts; (2) downscaling spatially and temporally aggregated wind fields to obtain more realistic wind speeds that would represents gusts; and (3) downscaling storm damage within the 2500 km(2) pixels of ORCHIDEE-CAN. This new version of ORCHIDEE-CAN was parameterized over Sweden. Subsequently, the performance of the model was tested against data for historical storms in southern Sweden between 1951 and 2010 and south-western France in 2009. In years without big storms, here defined as a storm damaging less than 15 x 10(6) m(3) of wood in Sweden, the model error is 1.62 x 10(6) m(3), which is about 100% of the observed damage. For years with big storms, such as Gudrun in 2005, the model error increased to 5.05 x 10(6) m(3), which is between 10 and 50% of the observed damage. When the same model parameters were used over France, the model reproduced a decrease in leaf area index and an increase in albedo, in accordance with SPOT-VGT and MODIS records following the passing of Cyclone Klaus in 2009. The current version of ORCHIDEE-CAN (revision 4262) is therefore expected to have the capability to capture the dynamics of forest structure due to storm disturbance on both regional and global scales, although the empirical parameters calculating gustiness from the gridded wind fields and storm damage from critical wind speeds may benefit from regional fitting.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Blennow, Kristina, et al.
(författare)
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Forest owner motivations and attitudes towards supplying biomass for energy in Europe
- 2014
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Ingår i: Biomass and Bioenergy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0961-9534 .- 1873-2909. ; 67, s. 223-230
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The European Commission expects the use of biomass for energy in the EU to increasesignificantly between 2010 and 2020 to meet a legally binding target to cover at least 20%of EU’s total energy use from renewable sources in 2020. According to estimates made bythe member states of the EU, the direct supply of biomass from forests is expected toincrease by 45% on a volume basis between 2006 and 2020 in response to increasingdemand (Beurskens LWM, Hekkenberg M, Vethman P. Renewable energy projections aspublished in the national renewable energy action plans of the European Member states.ECN and EEA; 2011. http://https://www.ecn.nl/docs/library/report/2010/e10069.pdf[accessed 25.04.2014]; Dees M, Yousef A, Ermert J. Analysis of the quantitative tables ofthe national renewable energy action plans prepared by the 27 European Union MemberStates in 2010. BEE working paper D7.2. Biomass Energy Europe project. FELIS e Departmentof Remote Sensing and landscape information Systems, University of Freiburg,Germany; 2011). Our aims were to test the hypotheses that European private forestowners’ attitudes towards supplying woody biomass for energy (1) can be explained bytheir responses to changes in prices and markets and (2) are positive so that the forestbiomass share of the EU 2020 renewable energy target can be met. Based on survey datacollected in 2010 from 800 private forest owners in Sweden, Germany and Portugal ourresults show that the respondents’ attitudes towards supplying woody biomass for energycannot be explained as direct responses to changes in prices and markets. Our results,furthermore, imply that European private forest owners cannot be expected tosupply the requested amounts of woody biomass for energy to meet the forest biomassshare of the EU 2020 renewable energy target, at least if stemwood is to play theimportant role as studies by Verkerk PJ, Anttila P, Eggers J, Lindner M, Asikainen A. Therealisable potential supply of woody biomass fromforests in the European Union. For EcolManag 2011;261: 2007e2015, UNECE and FAO. The European forest sector outlook study II 2010e2030. United Nations, New York and Geneva; 2011 [abbreviated to EFSOS II] andElbersen B, Staritsky I, Hengeveld G, Schelhaas MJ, Naeff H, Bo¨ ttcher H. Atlas of EUbiomass potentials; 2012. Available from: http://www.biomassfutures.eu [accessed14.10.2013] suggest.
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| 9. |
- Blennow, Kristina, et al.
(författare)
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Forest Owners' Response to Climate Change : University Education Trumps Value Profile
- 2016
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Ingår i: PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 11:5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Do forest owners’ levels of education or value profiles explain their responses to climate change? The cultural cognition thesis (CCT) has cast serious doubt on the familiar and often criticized "knowledge deficit" model, which says that laypeople are less concerned about climate change because they lack scientific knowledge. Advocates of CCT maintain that citizens with the highest degrees of scientific literacy and numeracy are not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, this is the group in which cultural polarization is greatest, and thus individuals with more limited scientific literacy and numeracy are more concerned about climate change under certain circumstances than those with higher scientific literacy and numeracy. The CCT predicts that cultural and other values will trump the positive effects of education on some forest owners' attitudes to climate change. Here, using survey data collected in 2010 from 766 private forest owners in Sweden and Germany, we provide the first evidence that perceptions of climate change risk are uncorrelated with, or sometimes positively correlated with, education level and can be explained without reference to cultural or other values. We conclude that the recent claim that advanced scientific literacy and numeracy polarizes perceptions of climate change risk is unsupported by the forest owner data. In neither of the two countries was university education found to reduce the perception of risk from climate change. Indeed in most cases university education increased the perception of risk. Even more importantly, the effect of university education was not dependent on the individuals' value profile.
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| 10. |
- Blennow, Kristina
(författare)
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Skador och effekter av storm – : en kunskapsöversikt
- 2013
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sammanfattning Omfattningen av stormskador har ökat under senare tid i Sverige såväl som i Europa. För Sveriges vidkommande inträffade de hittills mest omfattande skadorna och effekterna i samband med stormen Gudrun år 2005 då 18 personer miste livet. Skadekostnaderna har beräknats till sammanlagt 20,8 miljarder kronor (MSB 2012). Stormen Gudrun har av Energimyndigheten klassats som den allvarligaste naturkatastrofen som drabbat Sverige i modern tid (EM 2006). Utöver dödsfall och olyckor skadades skog, byggnader, infrastuktur och annan egendom. Skadorna gav i sin tur upphov till ytterligare effekter. Många av dessa är svåra att orsaksmässigt binda till stormtillfället och/eller att mäta och hamnar därför ofta utanför kalkylen. Det behöver dock inte betyda att de är mindre viktiga. Det framtida vindklimatet är osäkert men vi kan inte utesluta att det blir blåsigare framöver. Det finns tecken som tyder på att stormar skulle kunna bli både mera intensiva med högre vindhastigheter som följd och omfatta större geografiska områden (Rummukainen 2012). I kombination med en stigande havsnivå och förändrat nederbördsmönster till följd av klimatförändringarna kan framtida stormar ge upphov till omfattande och allvarliga översvämningar, särskilt i södra Sverige där en stigande havsnivå inte (tillräckligt) kompenseras av landhöjningen (SOU 2007). Även om det inte blir blåsigare framöver förväntas sannolikheten för stormskador på skog öka till följd av bland annat ökad tillväxt hos skogen under ett förändrat klimat. Syftet med denna rapport är att utifrån litteraturstudium ge en översikt av kunskapsläget vad gäller stormar, de skador och effekter de ger upphov till samt hur riskerna hanteras. Dessutom är syftet att identifiera kunskapsluckor som är särskilt angelägna att fylla igen för att bidra till att ge möjlighet till att bättre hantera risken för skador och negativa effekter av storm. Utgångspunkten för arbetet har varit att risker, åtminstone delvis, är något som faktiskt finns i den fysiska världen och att vi genom kunskap om orsakssamband och människors tilltro, attityder, lärandestrategier och målsättningar kan utveckla metoder för att påverka risken och minska förlusten av det som är värdefullt. I rapporten anläggs ett systemperspektiv på problematiken för att visa hur skador på strukturer till följd av storm orsaksmässigt binds samman med effekter på systemets funktion och som i sin tur kan användas för att identifiera värden på spel till följd av storm. Resultaten visar att trots att kunskapen om skador och effekter av storm förbättrats under senare år finns det fortfarande stora kunskapsluckor som det är angeläget att så långt som möjligt fylla igen. Kunskapsluckorna gäller såväl de orsaksmässiga sambanden, hur människor uppfattar risk och fattar beslut som möjligheten att på ett demokratiskt sätt värdera det som riskeras av storm, där skillnad görs mellan verkliga målsättningar och medlen för att nå målen. Kunskapsluckorna skulle lättare kunna fyllas igen genom bättre tillgång till systematiskt insamlade data. Genom att skillnaden mellan personers upplevda risk och de riskminskande åtgärder de vidtagit visat sig ibland vara stor, trots att flera möjliga åtgärder är kända, finns ett stort behov av att förbättra kunskapen om individers tilltro, målsättningar och sätt att lära, för att därigenom ge bättre förutsättningar för mera effektiv riskkommunikation. Den individbaserade kunskapen gör det möjligt för samhället att på ett demokratiskt sätt hantera risker och värdekonflikter och verka för individens välbefinnande. Den gör det dessutom möjligt att underlätta individens lärande så att hon eller han också själv bättre ska kunna hantera risker och därigenom kunna verka för att uppnå sina mål.
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