Ninth webinar: Working towards an understanding of the N retention capacity of afforested forest soils
Presenter: Caitlin Lewis
Date and time: 13th March 2024; 14:00 – 14:45 PM (CET)
The CLEANFOREST webinar series is hosted by the COST Action’s Young Researchers community for all interested researchers and practitioners during the second and fourth week of every month. For the Ninth event in the series we will be joined by Caitlin Lewis, reporting on her STSM carried out in 2023.
Elevated nitrate leaching from forest soils threatens surface and groundwater quality, and is associated with soil acidification and loss of base cations, compromising the nutritional status of trees. During her PhD research she explored the effect of former land-use on nitrate leaching from forest soils using data extracted from the literature, and identified former land-use as a factor driving variation in the response of nitrate leaching to elevated N-inputs. This finding led to the hypothesis that the affect of former land management practices on topsoil nutrient availability affected the capacity of forests to retain N-inputs.
The goal of Caitlin’s CLEANFOREST STSM was to assess the potential of the ICP Forests Level II database in exploring former land-use impacts on the capacity of European forests to retain N-inputs. The database had poor representation of afforested heathland, grassland and arable land, with the majority of sites being primary forest or rotations situated on land formerly under native forest. Direct conclusions on the effect of former-land use on the capacity of European forests to retain N-inputs therefore remained restrained by data-availability. However, as she explained, they started to explore relationships between topsoil nutrient availability, deposition and deep soil nitrate leaching, which can potentially inform afforestation efforts.
Where: MS Teams: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/1e73efad-da5f-43bc-b51c-b79be6b9841b@c715e6ac-7770-4e32-8741-3be9759766f0
Deadline: please sign-up via the registration link above before the webinar.
Contact:
- Presenter: Caitlin Lewis caitlin.lewis@forestresearch.gov.uk
- Webinar convenor: Charlotte Angove charlotte.angove@luke.fi
- Webinar convenor: Andrei Popa popa.andrei.dorna@gmail.com
