“Managing forests in the 21st century” final conference of the FORMASAM project, held together with REFORCE and FOREXCLIM research projects.

A few weeks ago the final conference of the projects FORMASAM, REFORCE, and FOREXCLIM, was held at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. Thank you to Christopher Reyer (FORMASAM PI ) and all the PIK team for the great organisation of this conference with 115 participants at the conference and up to 35 online.

See more details on this news on the PIK website https://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/climate-resilience/projects/project-pages/formasam/meetings/4

 

Launch of REFORCE WebApp

We are excited to announce the launch of the REFORCE WebApp – a new website arising from the joint work of the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences – KU Leuven, Belgium (Wanda De Keersmaecker, Ben Somers) and the Slovenian Forestry Institute (Nikica Ogris) in REFORCE WP2. The REFORCE WebApp provides remote sensing ecosystems stability metrics based on the methodology of De Keersmaecker et al. (2015), extending previous analysis on NDVI to multiple remote sensing metrics (NDWI, EVI, and LAI) for forest ecosystems across Europe.

Reference

De Keersmaecker, W., Lhermitte, S., Honnay, O., Farifteh, J., Somers, B., & Coppin, P. (2014). How to measure ecosystem stability? An evaluation of the reliability of stability metrics based on remote sensing time series across the major global ecosystems. Global Change Biology, 20(7), 2149–2161. doi: 10.1111/gcb.12495

Final Conference Announcement

“Managing forests in the 21st century” 3rd – 5th March 2020 at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research

The conference on “Managing forests in the 21st century” is the final conference of the FORMASAM, REFORCE and FOREXCLIM research projects see details here.

A new publication from WP4 is just out!

Seidl, R. et al. 2018. Harnessing landscape heterogeneity for managing future disturbance risks in forest ecosystems. – Journal of Environmental Management 209: 46–56. link

This paper explores disturbances impacts in a forest landscape in the Northern Front Range of the Alps in Austria  and shows that:
  • Climate change increases disturbances from wind and bark beetles by +39.5%
  • Promoting mixed forests and climate-adapted species reduces disturbance risk.
  • The spatial distribution of disturbance risk on the landscape is highly uneven.
  • Differences in the contribution to and control of risk can inform risk response.
  • Heterogeneity helps to address both positive and negative effects of disturbance.