Monitoring the Sustainable Development of Forest Ecosystems at the Modern Stage of Global Warming

A working concept of the geosystem monitoring of forest ecosystems under modern global warming is outlined. It is planned to carry out a full cycle of monitoring in the classical Israel‒Gerasimov triad: observation (state assessment)–control (forecast)–management (adaptation, feedback, regulation). The program of scientific research involves developing empirical and statistical models of the state of forest ecosystems in the past, present, and future, as well as uncovering the mechanisms of forest forward and backward linkages with climate. The models should describe the spatial diversity of the local and regional responses of forest cover to climatic signals, as well as the regulation patterns of the carbon cycle by forest biogeosystems. According to the Paris Agreement (2015) on climate change, it is planned to solve the two-pronged problem of “adsorption–adaptation”: quantify the ecological resources of boreal and nemoral forests in mitigating modern warming and calculate sustainability parameters of forests to a changing climate as a measure of their adaptive potential. In terms of solving this problem, a working algorithm for the geosystem monitoring of forests is proposed that describes a successive change in the stages of observation, forecasting, and regulation, with the identification of mitigation and adaptation effects on the carbon balances of forest ecosystems. The working tool of analysis is represented by a sliding (pendulum) operating system where observation and forecasting are repeated many times, and the basic landscape–ecological relationships are regarded as mechanisms of the metabolic response of forest communities to climate change. The program that is presented describes one way to solve the main scientific and practical task of monitoring, i.e., establish the ecological potential of forest ecosystems in given zonal and regional conditions for the transition to adaptive forestry.