Excel code for: Trading off nature for nature-based solutions: The bioeconomics of forest management for wildlife, timber and carbon

This dataset contains MS Excel spreadsheet code used to analyze an integrative model that illustrates the inherent trade-offs that will arise among the competing values for landscape space in a boreal forest ecosystem involving interactions among the main trophic compartments of an intact boreal ecosystem, aka “nature”. The model accounts for carbon accumulation via biomass growth of forest trees (timber), carbon loss due to controls from moose herbivory that varies with moose population density (hunting), and soil carbon inputs and release, which together determine net ecosystem productivity (NEP), a measure of carbon sink strength of the ecosystem. We examine how controls on carbon dynamics are altered by forest management for timber harvest, and by moose hunting. We link the ecological dynamics with an economic analysis by assigning a price to carbon stored within the intact boreal forest ecosystem. We then weigh these carbon impacts against the economic benefits of timber production and hunting across a range of moose population densities. Combined, this carbon-bioeconomic program calculates the total ecosystem benefit of a modelled boreal forest system, providing a framework for examining how different forest harvest and moose densities influence the achievement of carbon storage targets, under different levels of carbon pricing.

Methods
The Excel spreadsheet converts the analytical model into code to numerically calculate carbon benefits. Data in the article figures are generated using the spread code.