A few members of the CLEANFOREST core group (Rossella Guerrieri, Mariangela Fotelli, Klaudia Ziemblinska and Yann Salmon) are co-organizing a session in next year’s eLTER science conference, on Long-term ecosystem observations and manipulations to understand the effects of global change on forest ecosystems (B8)‘. The conference will be in Tampere (Finland) on 23-27th June 2025 and the Abstract submission is open until January 31 2025. Description of the session is provided below:
The ability of forests to continue mitigating climate change depends on how well they cope with and adapt to global change drivers, such as more frequent climate extreme events (e.g., droughts and heatwaves) and concomitant changes in atmospheric CO2 and reactive nitrogen and sulphur deposition. Ecosystem-scale investigations over the past decades have significantly advanced the understanding of forest responses to individual global change drivers. However, critical mechanisms at the cellular, tissue, organism, and ecosystem level are still insufficiently understood to predict the long-term effects of global change drivers and their interaction on ecosystem-scale processes that go beyond a single disturbance event. In the proposed session, we aim at bringing together research communities working on assessing climate extremes and atmospheric deposition impacts on European forests by using observation under ambient conditions or long-term ecosystem-level manipulation experiments. We seek contributions linking processes at different scales (e.g., ground-based observations on trees and soil and their interactions, and how they relate to remotely-sensed regional/continental assessments) and integrating observations with modelling. Moreover, we encourage contributions providing examples of interactions between eLTER and other monitoring networks (e.g., ICP Forests and ICOS) in integrating information at different scales to gain a holistic understanding of ecosystem functions. Lastly, we welcome contributions from researchers that perform long-term terrestrial ecosystem manipulation experiments with researchers that exploit long-term landscape-level datasets such as inventories or remote sensing products and terrestrial ecosystem modellers with the goal to improve the understanding of sustained long-term responses of ecosystems to global change factors.
Please submit your abstract and contribute to a stimulating discussion on a multiscale approach to assess forest responses to global change!
