Computational tools for modelling global ecological change impacts and adaptations in forest ecosystems

全球生态变化和/或其缓解正在对森林生态系统的结构和动态产生意想不到的影响，然而，对各种应激源如何与干扰机制相互作用以影响这些指标的了解尚不清楚。这种相互作用可能会产生各种影响--从改变树木增长率到物种生态位扩张，再到改变镶嵌生态系统中的替代稳定状态--进而可以极大地改变我们在地方和区域尺度上管理和保护森林生态系统的方向。在全球范围内，不断增加的人口对我们维持人道生计和环境完整性的能力造成了前所未有的压力。人类主导的生态系统在历史和现代的崩溃表明，我们对人-环境耦合系统没有很好的理解，因此，可持续发展的道路在很大程度上仍然是未知的。例如，森林保护与节约土地和农业产量等问题密切相关。我们认为，使用计算密集型模型开发的场景以分析方法无法捕捉到的方式捕捉复杂性，揭示了帮助指导适应战略以避免未来令人不快的“惊喜”的可能性。

Global ecological change and/or its mitigation are having unexpected effects on forest ecosystem structure and dynamics, however an understanding of how various stressors interact with disturbance regimes to affect such indicators is unknown. Such interactions can have a variety of effects -- from changing tree growth rates to species niche expansion to flipping of alternative stable states in mosaic ecosystems -- and can in turn dramatically change our directions for management and conservation of forest ecosystems at local and regional scales. At global scales increasing human population has created unprecedented pressure on our ability to sustain humane livelihoods as well as the integrity of our environments. The collapse of human-dominated ecosystems in historical and recent times suggests that we do not have a good understanding of human-environment coupled systems, and thus the pathways to sustainability are still largely uncharted. Forest conservation, for example, is intimately linked with things like land sparing and agricultural yield. We argue that scenarios developed using computationally intensive models capture complexity in ways that that analytical approaches cannot, revealing possibilities to help guide adaptation strategies to avert future unpleasant "surprises".