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Tag: extreme drought

Wird in Europa tatsächlich mehr Holz geerntet? Neue Studie stellt Forschungsergebnisse in Frage

Interview mit Forstexperten zu neuen Forschungsergebnissen

Heute ist mit “Concerns about reported harvests in European forests” in Nature eine vom European Forest Institute (EFI) koordinierte Antwort auf die umstrittene Nature-Studie von Ceccherini et al. “Abrupt increase in harvested forest area over Europe after 2015” (Abrupte Zunahme der geernteten Waldfläche in Europa nach 2015) veröffentlicht worden, die deren Ergebnisse stark in Zweifel zieht. In dem Antwort-Artikel zeigen EFI’s Direktor Marc Palahí und 29 Kolleg*innen aus 13 europäischen Ländern, dass die von der Gemeinsamen Forschungsstelle der Europäischen Kommission berichteten großen Waldverluste vor allem auf methodische Fehler zurückzuführen sind.

Mit Jürgen Bauhus, Marc Hanewinkel (beide Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), Marcus Lindner (EFI), Rupert Seidl und Cornelius Senf (beide Technische Universität München) haben wir verschiedene an der Antwort-Studie beteiligte deutsche Wissenschaftler befragt, um die wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse in einen größeren waldpolitischen, ökonomischen und ökologischen Kontext einordnen zu können und die methodischen Aspekte etwas genauer zu beleuchten.

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When wells run dry our oaks decline, too

How groundwater access impacts the resilience of oaks to drought

Fresh water is essential to all living creatures and humans have become particularly well-versed in using it for both business and pleasure. We use it grow our food, to run our industries and even to flush our toilets in many countries. Much of the fresh water used in the world comes from the groundwater, and the extraction of groundwater is likely to increase more in the future, partly due to droughts. However, a recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Freiburg and published in Scientific Reports shows that extracting the groundwater to water our gardens can cause serious problems to forests growing on the areas from where the water is taken.

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Life after recovery: how Scots pine trees compensate for drought

Did you know that researchers have linked extreme drought events to losses in forest productivity and widespread tree mortality on every forested continent on earth? As a result of climate change, in the coming decades we expect these drought events to increase in frequency, duration and intensity in many parts of the world, posing an emerging set of challenges at a scale that many contemporary forests have so far not had to deal with. This in turn means that we need to understand how forests respond to, and recover from, such events across a range of both temporal and spatial scales to ensure our forests are resilient to the challenges of a future climate. This understanding must cover everything from how between-tree variability buffers against stand-level change, which tree and stand attributes and management practices confer resilience, how different species growing in different locations respond to similar types of drought and what the long-term implications of these events mean for biodiversity, forest carbon, stand structure and forest growth, amongst many others. In our recent paper “Life after recovery: Increased resolution of forest resilience assessment sheds new light on post‐drought compensatory growth and recovery dynamics” published in the Journal of Ecology (Ovenden et al. 2021), we look at the recovery of trees after drought from a new perspective.

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