We are pleased to share the highlights of a fascinating keynote presentation given by Petr Horáček, the leader of the Forest4Future project, during our recent event. His presentation, entitled “Climate change as a trigger for forest change in Central Europe – what lessons have we learned from biomonitoring of forest ecosystems?”, explored critical aspects of climate-induced changes in our forests.
Abstract:
One of the major potential effects of climate warming across terrestrial biomes is an increase in climate-driven tree mortality, particularly mortality triggered by a combination of drought and hotter temperatures. Under a rapidly changing climate, an accelerated understanding of the diverse patterns and processes driving dynamic ecosystem responses is needed to effectively address the challenges of sustainably managing and restoring affected ecosystems. Forests, the terrestrial ecosystems with the highest water demand, will likely be the most influenced by the changing water regime. Water has a central role in all plant physiological processes and changes in its availability could drive structural and process shifts on the cell level up to the level of the whole tree. This is leading to consequences that range from reduced tree growth to large-scale disturbances of forest ecosystems. All these factors are contributing to severe economic losses for European forest lands. Hence, knowledge concerning the changing climate and its specific impact on trees across the elevation gradient is becoming essential for forestry planning and management to ensure optimal forest functioning as constrained by the growth environment. Now we are not facing a question about how to increase productivity (including C-sequestration) per given forest area, but rather how to ensure forest existence and how to restore forest ecosystem stability that has been drastically reduced within recent years. Here we propose to quantitatively assess both the production and regulation function performance of forests and provide a new paradigm highlighting that high care is needed not only to sustain the production functions as was done up to now but emphasise how to maintain and enhance the regulation functions with the same or even higher priority as is done for the production function.