Assessing natural hazards in forestry for risk management: a review

We address the problem of how to integrate risk assessment into forest management and therefore provide a comprehensive review of recent and past literature on risk analysis and modeling and, moreover, an evaluation and summary on these papers. We provide a general scheme on how to integrate concepts of risk into forest management decisions. After an overview of the risk management process and the main hazards in forests (storm, snow, insects, fire), the paper focuses on the principal methods used to assess risks from these hazards for commercial forestry. We review mechanistic models, empirical models, and expert systems and consider the needs for different spatial scales of risk assessment, from the regional to the single-tree level. In addition to natural hazards and their secondary effects, we deal with economic aspects of risk analysis. Monte Carlo simulations to deal with volatile timber prices and ways to include risk in classical Faustmann approaches are briefly discussed along with the integration of portfolio theory into forest management decision making and attitude toward risk. Special attention is paid to the implications for risk modeling under climate change.