Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change
The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) Network is a collaborative effort to establish a series of experimental silvicultural trials across a network of different forest ecosystem types in the United States and Canada.
Our Framework
Climate Adaptation in Forested Ecosystems
Managing for resistance means improving the defenses of the forest against anticipated changes, or directly defending the forest against disturbance, in order to maintain relatively unchanged conditions.
Managing for resilience means accommodating some degree of change, but encouraging a return to a prior condition or an identified benchmark condition following disturbance.
Managing for transition (or response) means intentionally accommodating change and enabling ecosystems to adaptively respond to changing and new conditions.
About
The ASCC Study
To develop the ASCC study, we brought together a core team of scientists and managers interested in integrating climate change adaptation into their silvicultural planning and on-the-ground management actions at each site. The big question ASCC is poised to answer is: What actions can be taken to enhance the ability of a system to cope with change while continuing to meet management goals and objectives?
ASCC Network Impact
Adaptation Framework
The Resistance-Resilience-Transition Framework approach directly informs larger-scale land management policies and implementation.
200 Partners
Over 200 management and science collaborators are sharing lessons learned from ASCC to advance climate-informed forest management.
15+ years
ASCC is the largest experimental silviculture program focused on climate adaptation in the USA, including 14 statistically robust, operational, and diverse experimental sites.
500 Trained
Over 500 natural resource professionals have been directly trained in applying climate-adaptive silviculture using ASCC site examples through the Forest Service’s National Advanced Silviculture Program
The ASCC Network is a collaborative community of scientists and managers working across experimental sites in the US and Canada. Network coordination is supported in part by the USDA Forest Service and carried out by the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science.