CREAF Talk M. González-Sanchís: Water, fire, climate resilience & biomass: adapting watersheds to CC

CREAF Talk with María González Sanchís: Coupling water, fire and climate resilience with biomass production in forestry to adapt watersheds to climate change
The Life Resilient Forests project promotes sustainable forest management at the watershed scale, to improve forests resilience to wildfires, water scarcity, environmental degradation and other effects induced by climate change, while supporting biomass production. The project works with different case study sites, facing diverse climate change challenges. The main output of the project is a Decision Support System (DSS), CAFE, a tool to introduce forest managers to the climate change adaptation process, and to allow forest managers to select their objectives and chose the optimum management approach to reach them.
CAFE (Carbon, Aqua, Fire & Eco-resilience) is a Multi-Objective Decision Support System (MODSS) for forest management stems. This tool determines the optimum silvicultural activities to manage multiple products, goods and services (G&S) such as biomass production, carbon sequestration, fire risk, water provisioning, climatic resilience or biodiversity, which are simultaneously quantified in time and space for a selected solution. To that end, CAFE combines eco-hydrological simulation and multi-objectives optimization with evolutionary algorithms. Finishing the execution with an interactive visualization of the results that allows the user to understand and select the most appropriate option.
CAFE shows two main potentials: on the one hand, it quantifies the G&S provisioning of forests, with and without forest management. On the other hand, it provides a management scheme focused in more than one goal at the same time, and therefore includes the potential trade-offs between them. Furthermore, the designing and development of CAFE has always included the stakeholders participation, trying to answer practical questions when planning forest management. It has already been applied to optimize forest management of both, productive and protective forests, highlighting its versatility.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Graduated in Forestry Engineering in 2005. Se has been working in academia focused on water, obtaining her doctorate in Environmental and Hydraulic Engineering in 2012 at the Technical University of Valencia (Spain), where she currently develops her career as a post-doc researcher and assistant professor at the Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering Department. She is mainly interested in fundamental and applied research on forest management, eco-hydrology and environmental hydraulics, particularly in upper catchment environments and riparian zones, to inform goods and services provisioning, conservation, management and restoration practices.
She is currently the project manager of the European project LIFE Resilient Forests, and an assistant professor at the Environmental Hydraulics Department teaching subjects such as forest ecology, fluid mechanics, surface hydrology, environmental flows, hydraulic and hydrological modeling, and environmental impacts in degrees like Civil Engineering, Forestry Engineering or Environmental Hydraulics Master.
During her graduate studies in the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (Spain) and Fluid Mechanics Department of the University of Zaragoza (Spain), she acquired a strong multidisciplinary theoretical knowledge in fluvial hydraulics, aquatic and terrestrial ecology, hydro-geomorphology and numerical modeling. Her PhD was focused on understanding the flooding (surface and groundwater flows) and morphologic dynamics of floodplains within the frame of ecological restoration to inform management plans. Then she joined the Forestry Science and Technology Group (ReForest) at the Research Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering (IIAMA) (Valencia, Spain) to assess the interactions between sediment, vegetation and water quality in semiarid Mediterranean forest plot and basin scales. With this project, Reforest group opened a line of research that resulted in national and international research projects where they are currently working. As this line of research progressed, the involvement of citizens and stakeholders became a key point to make it successful.