Forests are increasingly under threat from pests and pathogens, disturbance events, and climatic extremes. Navigating forest management decisions under these uncertain futures is a complex challenge, particularly when decisions entail numerous stakeholders across public and private boundaries. Traditionally, observations and models are used to understand past, current, and future forest conditions, but these methodologies may only partially illuminate pathways of forest change and may not fully capture the multiple objectives held by communities and other stakeholders.  This issue is especially acute given that humans might need to be physically immersed in forests of the future to understand how that experience might shape decisions that are made today.

In this interdisciplinary project, we developed an integrative approach to link results of forest landscape change simulated by landscape models to an immersive, interactive virtual reality tool.  Our goals were to, first, test whether immersive experiences could better inform sustainable forest management decisions by allowing users to experience potential forests of the future in a way that was more closely related to the human experience of being embedded within a forest. Second, we aimed to test whether these immersive experiences would enable greater levels of systemic thinking about forests, thus enhancing sustainability education competencies. Third, we aimed to identify what climate conditions and management choices would optimize forest stewardship across multiple objectives, such as biodiversity, carbon storage, and the persistence of culturally important but rare species.  Finally, we explored whether these results and visual technologies could help to deepen engagement with the Menominee sustainability model, given that our study area included the Menominee Tribal Reservation     in northern Wisconsin.   

Our results showed that windthrow, emerald ash borer, and climate change will shift forest species composition across the study area. The resilience of the forest to windthrow was spatially variable, with some locations in the north recovering quickly, whereas other locations, mostly in the south, did not recover to pre-disturbance conditions by the year 2100 (Lucash et al. 2019).  Although emerald ash borer is likely to kill ash species across the study area, our results showed that this is likely to have little effect on overall species biodiversity given its low dominance on the landscape; however, loss of ash species could have important cultural implications (Olson et al. 2021).

We combined these model results with forest inventory data to develop procedural rules to translate them into immersive experiences (Huang et al. 2020). Users can interact with the immersive tool to explore forest conditions that represent different outcomes of management and climate futures and can toggle to view particular species or perspectives.  We also developed digital 360-degree videos or virtual field tours using game engine software that included Menominee community members or forest managers describing important locations on the landscape, stories of forest change, and management goals.  We tested the utility of these products to enhance communication and learning through participatory exercises and surveys.  Our results showed that interactive and immersive storytelling can help illuminate systems-thinking about these management choices and aid communication, particularly for public stakeholders who are initially opposed or indifferent toward the planned landscape changes (Steidle et al, in review).

Our project also highlighted that there will likely be tradeoffs across objectives under future management and climate conditions. These tradeoffs are minimized under the scenarios that included the lowest levels of climate change (Lucash et al, in review).  Additionally, within all climate scenarios, the choice of forest management mattered, with uneven-aged forest management strategies showing the greatest opportunity to achieve multiple objectives.  This result highlights that there are forest management practices that can be used to optimize objectives, even under higher levels of climate change.

Our project directly enhanced STEM education by supporting seven graduate students (three M.S. and four Ph.D.), six junior faculty members, postdocs, or technicians, and seventeen undergraduate students from the College of Menominee Nation who were funded through research experiences.  Our project also enhanced technical training in the College of Menominee Nation through the development of a new course titled Interactive Media Design and Development, which is part of a Digital Media AAS degree program.  Through our use of the LANDIS-II model on Linux-based, high-performance computing systems, our project has enhanced capacity for using landscape models to design and run experiments that have greater computational demand. Our results were disseminated through 22 papers, two book chapters, 54 presentations, a webpage, vlogs, blogs, and a documentary.

Last Modified: 12/13/2022
Modified by: Erica A Smithwick