Southeastern US timber market response to climate change impacts on forestry and agriculture

This paper is one component of a set of three WRR papers describing the ecological, economic, and land use consequences of climate change on forested ecosystems of the Southeastern U.S. The companion papers are McNulty et at, 2000, "Southern United States forest productivity and water yield under a warmer and wetter climate" and Murray et al., 2001, "Land allocation in the Southeastern U.S. in response to climate change impacts on forestry and agriculture", both in press at World Resource Review. This paper describes the fundamental linkage between the ecological perturbations and market and land use response. The integrated assessments issues of the appropriate scale for providing a rich ecological characterization while also simulating response to aggregate market responses are described. Differences in species response and ownership characteristics are shown to influence both the level and distribution of market responses.