11 Nov

Zoom

Monitoring and understanding forest mortality

seminars, workshops |

Identifying and quantifying patterns and trends in forest die-offs is critical to understand causes of tree mortality. Knowledge of forests responses to disturbances such as drought, insect outbreaks, disease, and fires will not only help improve forest management but is also necessary to predict changes in the global carbon cycle and the fate of our future climate .

The Crop Production Ecology Seminars is a free and online platform for scientific debate about agricultural production and sustainability between academics, stakeholders, and the general public.

In this seminar, we will hear about monitoring and understanding forest mortality with recent insights in the following talks.

Watch the seminar on Youtube

Tree mortality in response to climate extremes -  more physiology for prediction

Tree mortality in response to climate extremes has become a global phenomenon. Given the anticipated further increase in frequency and severity of future climate extremes, forecasting of forest dynamics into a warmer and drier future is a crucial element for management and policy making. Current prediction tools do not give coherent results, as tree resilience to stress from a physiological perspective is still not well implemented. For example, most models are lacking a realistic representation of carbon reserves as buffer against environmental stochasticity, which is a particularly important resilience mechanism in long-lived organisms like trees. This presentation will highlight the need for more physiological realism in vegetation models and show that carbon reserves are a good starting point for improvement.

Tree mortality in response to climate extremes -  more physiology for prediction

Watch Henrik´s talk on youtube

Henrik Hartmann
Department of Biogeochemical Processes, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

The role of carbon reserves in process-based forest management models

Climate change comes with challenges for forest management and forest management modeling. While in Nordic countries today it might still be a well-working approach to consider only healthy trees in modeling managed forest stands, in the future higher temperatures and more frequent extreme events will weaken tree health and consequently increase (delayed) tree mortality. One approach to model delayed effects of stress events on tree health and tree mortality is to assess a tree’s health state based on its status of carbon reserves. This presentation will highlight some advantages and disadvantages of including carbon reserves in process-based forest management models.

Watch Holger´s talk on Youtube 

Holger Metzler
Department of Crop Production Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

 

 


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