About

Forest managers need robust examples of how to integrate climate change adaptation into silvicultural planning and on-the-ground actions. 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.

Photo Credit: Jeff Fera, Natural Resources Canada

Scientists, land managers, and a variety of partners have developed fourteen trial sites as part of this multi-region study to research long-term ecosystem responses to a range of climate change adaptation actions.

Each trial is focused on understanding and evaluating management options designed to enable forests to respond to a changing climate. Site-specific treatments were developed according to local conditions and tailored to meet site-specific management objectives, while at the same time aligned under a common framework for answering questions about how different forest types will respond to future climate.

In using this two-tiered design, ASCC provides a means for evaluating adaptive management strategies across distinct forest types, allowing researchers to ask broad questions about climate change adaptation across all study sites, while also addressing on-the-ground management needs specific to individual sites.

ASCC Network Goals

The ASCC Network aims to achieve the following long-term goals:

  • Goal 1: Sustainable and Vibrant Network
    Maintain a highly engaged community of managers and scientists who are working collaboratively to develop, evaluate, and promote climate-informed silvicultural practices.
  • Goal 2: Generate Applied Science
    Generate science that is contributing to a growing body of knowledge addressing climate change challenges and developing best practices for implementing climate adaptation strategies in real-world scenarios.
  • Goal 3: Advance Implementation of Climate-Adaptive Silviculture
    Apply ASCC lessons learned in on-the-ground implementation of climate-adaptive silviculture practices in forest ecosystems through training with decision-makers.

The ASCC Impact

The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) Network is the largest experimental silviculture program focused on climate adaptation in North America and provides crucial information on how to manage forests for changing conditions. The Network currently maintains 14 statistically robust, operational, and diverse experimental sites, with 15 years of existing data at our oldest site.

Since its inception in 2009, the ASCC Network has accomplished:

  • Developing and implementing an experimental framework testing a suite of climate-adaptive management actions with practical, real-world relevance
  • Evaluating and comparing intentionally designed silvicultural treatments of resistance, resilience, and transition to identify forest adaptation interventions
  • Fostering diverse, collaborative science-management partnerships, which leads to more direct actionable science delivery and implementation of adaptation actions
  • Providing valuable insights to the broader community of researchers, managers, and others actively responding to climate change