Computing tool to incorporate functional approach to closed forests management to increase resilience to global changes**

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In the present context of global change, managing our forests is a major challenge, in particular because of the great uncertainty associated with these changes. Climate, exotic insects and diseases, future needs and expectations from forests (timber production) are all sources of uncertainty. Faced with this new reality, our methods of forecasting the developments in our forests are no longer effective enough, so we must review the way we manage our forests. Forests are complex and dynamic systems, and for that reason, never completely predictable. To foster forest resilience against the many known and unknown future disturbances, we must maintain a high level of diversity, more specifically functional diversity, as well as a strong connectivity to favor possible seed exchanges among stands. Functional traits affect individual performance and are directly linked to the way trees will answer and adapt to one or several environmental factors. Thus, a highly diversified forest will be more resilient against a large range of stresses. Although the functional approach is already applied in urban forests or in natural forests at the landscape scale, it has never been tested on a smaller scale, for instance in closed managed forests. It aims at developing the approach so private forest ownership can use it to improve the resilience of the forest even on a small scale. Using data from sites already inventoried, recommendations will be based on an evaluation of different indices of diversity of the forest (species richness and functional diversity), a spatial analysis of the territory (connectivity for seed dispersion) and a review of the future stresses threatening the region. In collaboration with Haliburton Forest (ON), we will characterize three different private properties varying in size and we will apply our functional network approach to test for an increase of ecological resilience. Our analysis will allow to simulate different scenarios of interventions for each of the forest, all of them increasing functional diversity of trees. By bridging the gap between research and forest management, this project will provide a simple approach to better include uncertainty and optimize interventions to immunize closed forests against global change.************