Daniel Scherrer

Daniel Scherrer
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL | WSL · Forest Dynamics Research Unit

PhD

About

58
Publications
17,534
Reads
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2,338
Citations
Introduction
I am an ecologist working in multiple fields including spatial ecology, bioinformatics, community ecology, conservation biology and climatology. During my PhD I studied the influence of micro-climate on the spatial distribution of artic/alpine plant species and their expected reaction to global warming. My research projects included the effect of drought on deciduous tree species, various technical as well as applied aspects of species distribution modelling and community ecology.
Additional affiliations
January 2019 - present
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL
Position
  • Scientific Staff Member
October 2013 - September 2018
University of Lausanne
Position
  • Lecturer
April 2007 - July 2011
University of Basel
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
April 2007 - July 2010
University of Basel
Field of study
  • Ecology
October 2005 - March 2007
University of Basel
Field of study
  • Ecology
October 2002 - September 2005
University of Basel
Field of study
  • Biology

Publications

Publications (58)
Article
Der Schweizer Wald beherbergt zahlreiche Baumarten mit unterschiedlichen ökologischen Ansprüchen an Licht, Nährstoffen und Klima. In der empirischen Waldmodellierung werden ähnliche Baumarten oft gruppiert, weil zu wenige Beobachtungen vorliegen, um artspezifische Modelle für Einwuchs, Wachstum und Mortalität zu entwickeln. Wir präsentieren eine ne...
Article
Full-text available
Forests are undergoing increasing risks of drought-induced tree mortality. Species replacement patterns following mortality may have a significant impact on the global carbon cycle. Among major hardwoods, deciduous oaks (Quercus spp.) are increasingly reported as replacing dying conifers across the Northern Hemisphere. Yet, our knowledge on the gro...
Article
Full-text available
Forests provide essential ecosystem services that range from the production of timber to the mitigation of natural hazards. Rapid environmental changes, such as climate warming or the intensification of disturbance regimes, threaten forests and endanger forest ecosystem services. In light of these challenges, it is essential to understand forests'...
Article
Full-text available
Tree regeneration is a key process in forest dynamics, particularly in the context of forest resilience and climate change. Models are pivotal for assessing long-term forest dynamics, and they have been in use for more than 50 years. However, there is a need to evaluate their capacity to accurately represent Handling Editor: Charles D. Canham tree...
Article
Im Rahmen des Projektes NaiS-LFI wurden in den Jahren 2014–2019 die Vegetationshöhenstufen und die Standorttypen auf den zugänglichen Waldprobeflächen des Schweizerischen Landesforstinventars (LFI) bestimmt. Dies geschah in der Systematik der Wegleitung «Nachhaltigkeit und Erfolgskontrolle im Schutzwald» (NaiS). So bietet sich die Möglichkeit zu an...
Article
Full-text available
Forests are under pressure and going through rapid changes. However, current inventorying and monitoring (IM) programs are often either disjointed, too narrow in their scope and/or do not operate at fine enough temporal resolutions, which may hinder scientific understanding, the timely supply of information, fast decision making, and may result in...
Poster
Full-text available
This poster provides an overview of the scenario development within the SCENE Work Package 3 - Biomass Cycle.
Article
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Mast seeding is the episodic, massive production of plant seeds synchronized over large areas. The resulting superabundance of seeds represents a resource pulse that can profoundly affect animal populations across trophic levels. Following years of high seed production, the abundance of both seed consumers and their predators increase. Higher preda...
Article
Full-text available
Während Störungsfrequenz und-intensität die Struktur eines Bestandes und da-mit seine Eignung für verschiedene Baumarten prägen, beeinflusst die vorherr-schende Baumartenzusammensetzung die Empfindlichkeit des Bestandes gegen-über Störungen. Wir haben folgende Aspekte dieser Huhn-oder-Ei-Frage ana-lysiert: (1) Die Interaktion zwischen der Naturnähe...
Article
Full-text available
Werden Störungen in Wäldern auf der Alpennordseite in den nächsten Jahrzehn-ten zunehmen? Auf der Suche nach Antworten liefern quantitative Angaben über Waldschäden wie Sturmholz, Käferholz, Bruchholz und Waldbrandflächen vom Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts bis heute konkrete Anhaltspunkte. Trotz Unvoll-ständigkeit der Datenreihen zeigen die meisten Tr...
Preprint
Full-text available
Forests provide essential ecosystem services that range from the production of timber to the mitigation of natural hazards. Rapid environmental changes, such as climate warming or the intensification of disturbance regimes, threaten forests and endanger forest ecosystem services. In light of these challenges, it is essential to understand forests’...
Poster
Full-text available
TreeMig is a sophisticated forest landscape model that simulates the dynamic effects of climate on forest development, composition, and migration. Over the course of several decades, TreeMig has been extensively developed and applied to various scenarios such as tree species migration, climate change-driven forest transformation, and interactions w...
Article
Full-text available
In Swiss mountain areas, the protective function of forests is the predominant ecosystem service having high cultural and economic significance. It is assumed that natural forests or close-to-natural forests, i.e., forests being in the equilibrium with environmental conditions are the most resilient and resistant in regard to disturbances and hence...
Poster
Full-text available
Introducing the MastWeb platform, a tool designed to facilitate the way data on tree fecundity levels in Swiss forests is reported, shared, and visualized. This innovative web application streamlines the process of collecting and analyzing crucial ecological data by enabling straightforward recording of observations right from the field. MastWeb's...
Article
Full-text available
The tree species composition of Swiss forests is influenced by both environmental conditions and centuries of forest management, resulting in varying degrees of naturalness. Here, we estimate the naturalness of Swiss forests by comparing the tree species composition (i.e., dominance and presence/absence of tree species) recorded by the national for...
Article
Full-text available
Tree species differ in their physiological responses to drought, but the underlying causes are often unclear. Here we explored responses of radial growth to centennial drought events and sap flow (Fs) to seasonal drought in four mixed forests on either moist or drier sites in northwestern Switzerland. While the diffuse-porous species (Fagus sylvati...
Article
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Climate change exposes ecosystems to strong and rapid changes in their environmental boundary conditions mainly due to the altered temperature and precipitation patterns. It is still poorly understood how fast interlinked ecosystem processes respond to altered environmental conditions, if these responses occur gradually or suddenly when thresholds...
Article
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During the 20th century human activities drastically altered the natural environment at global and local scales by habitat destruction, urbanisation, intensive agriculture, and climate warming. This anthropogenic pressure has modified species distributions and abundances, and led to the increased spread of neophytes. However, the determination of t...
Article
Die Waldstandortkunde ist eine wichtige Grundlage für die waldbauliche Planung, indem sie Standorttypen definiert und für diese Baumartenempfehlungen formuliert. In der Schweiz wurde im Rahmen von Projekten «Nachhaltigkeit und Erfolgskontrolle im Schutzwald» (NaiS) in den letzten Jahren ein Standard von Standorttypen erarbeitet, der landesweite Bed...
Article
Full-text available
Widely observed inertia of forest communities contrasts with climate change projections that suggest dramatic alterations of forest composition for the coming decades. Disturbances might be a key process to catalyse changes in tree species composition under environmental change by creating opportunities for ‘new’ species to establish. To test this...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Correlative species distribution models (SDMs) are among the most frequently used tools for conservation planning under climate and land use changes. Conservation‐focused climate change studies are often conducted on a national or local level and can use different sources of occurrence records (e.g., local databases, national biodiversity monit...
Article
Full-text available
Tree regeneration (TR) in canopy gaps is a key process to understand how forest ecosystems might adapt to future environmental changes. Since successful TR is the result of a complex interplay of several stochastic events such as gap formation, seed production, ungulate pressure and diseases, some of the processes have been neglected or strongly re...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies have identified strong relationships between delayed recovery of tree growth after drought and tree mortality caused by subsequent droughts. These observations raise concerns about forest ecosystem services and post-drought growth recovery given the projected increase in drought frequency and extremes. For quantifying the impact of e...
Article
Full-text available
Assessing the degree to which climate explains the spatial distributions of different taxonomic and functional groups is essential for anticipating the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Most effort so far has focused on aboveground organisms, which offer only a partial view on the response of biodiversity to environmental gradients. Here, in...
Article
Full-text available
Species range limits are expected to be dramatically altered under future climate change and many species are predicted to shift their distribution upslope to track their suitable conditions (i.e. based on their niche). However, there might be large discrepancies between the speed of the upward shift of the climatic niche and the actual migration v...
Article
Stacked species distribution models (S‐SDM) provide a tool to make spatial predictions about communities by first modelling individual species and then stacking the modelled predictions to form assemblages. The evaluation of the predictive performance is usually based on a comparison of the observed and predicted community properties (e.g. species...
Article
Full-text available
Issue Approaches to predicting species assemblages through stacking individual niche‐based species distribution models (S‐SDMs) need to account for community processes other than abiotic filtering. Such constraints have been introduced by implementing ecological assembly rules (EARs) into S‐SDMs, and can be based on patterns of functional traits in...
Article
Full-text available
The questions of how much abiotic environment contributes to explain species distributions, and which abiotic factors are the most influential, are key when projecting species realized niches in space and time. Here, we show that answers to these questions can be obtained by using species’ ecological indicator values (EIVs). By calculating communit...
Article
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Aim Bats are important components of mammalian biodiversity and strong bioindicators, but their fine‐scale distributions often remain less known than other taxa (e.g., plants, birds). Yet as highly mobile species with multiple needs in the landscape, bats impose serious modelling challenges, such as advanced use of neighbourhood analyses. The aims...
Article
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Aim Species distribution information is essential under increasing global changes, and models can be used to acquire such information but they can be affected by different errors/bias. Here, we evaluated the degree to which errors in species data (false presences–absences) affect model predictions and how this is reflected in commonly used evaluati...
Article
Correlative species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to predict species distributions and assemblages, with many fundamental and applied uses. Different factors were shown to affect SDM prediction accuracy. However, real data cannot give unambiguous answers on these issues, and for this reason, artificial data have been increasingly used...
Article
Full-text available
Habitat filtering and limiting similarity are well‐documented ecological assembly processes that hierarchically filter species across spatial scales, from a regional pool to local assemblages. However, information on the effects of fine‐scale spatial partitioning of species, working as an additional mechanism of coexistence, on community patterns i...
Article
Full-text available
Soil temperature (ST) has a key role in Arctic ecosystem functioning and global environmental change. However, soil thermal conditions do not necessarily follow synoptic temperature variations. This is because local biogeophysical processes can lead to a pronounced soil-atmosphere thermal offset (∆T) while altering the coupling (βT) between ST and...
Article
The popularity of species distribution models ( SDM s) and the associated stacked species distribution models (S‐ SDM s), as tools for community ecologists, largely increased in recent years. However, while some consensus was reached about the best methods to threshold and evaluate individual SDM s, little agreement exists on how to best assemble i...
Article
The regional distribution of a plant species is a result of the dynamics of extinctions and colonizations in suitable habitats, especially in strongly fragmented landscapes. Here, we studied the role of spatial dynamics of the long-lived, clonal pioneer plant Geum reptans occurring on glacier forelands in the European Alps. We used demographic data...
Article
Aim Spatial predictions of future communities under climate change can be obtained by stacking species distribution models ( S ‐ SDM ), but proper evaluation of community S ‐ SDM predictions across time with fully independent data has rarely been carried out. The aim of this study was to evaluate the predictive abilities of S ‐ SDM s for whole fore...
Article
Aims: The choice of environmental predictor variables in correlative models of plant species distributions (hereafter SDMs) is crucial to ensure predictive accuracy and model realism, as highlighted in multiple earlier studies. Because variable selection is directly related to a model’s capacity to capture important species’ environmental requireme...
Code
Full-text available
Collection of R functions and data sets for the support of spatial ecology analyses with a focus on pre-, core and post- modelling analyses of species distribution, niche quantification and community assembly. Written by current and former members and collaborators of the ecospat group of Antoine Guisan, Department of Ecology and Evolution (DEE) &...
Article
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / a g r f o r m e t a b s t r a c t Most climate change projections for Central Europe predict higher mean summer temperatures and prolonged summer drought periods. However, in diverse mixed forest stands we expect tree species specific...
Article
Full-text available
genet a populační věková struktura pionýrského klonálního druhu Geum reptans, zjištěné pomocí de-mografických terénních dat a projekčních maticových modelů Lucienne C. d e W i t t e, Daniel S c h e r r e r & Jürg S t ö c k l i n D e d i c a t e d t o t h e m e m o r y o f L e o š K l i m e š. (2011): Genet longevity and population age structure of...
Article
Aim We aim to: (1) explore thermal habitat preferences in alpine plant species across mosaics of topographically controlled micro-habitats; (2) test the predictive value of so-called ‘indicator values’; and (3) quantify the shift in micro-habitat conditions under the influence of climate warming. Location Alpine vegetation 2200–2800 m a.s.l., Swiss...
Article
Full-text available
Strong topographic variation interacting with low stature alpine vegetation creates a multitude of micro-habitats poorly represented by common 2 m above the ground meteorological measurements (weather station data). However, the extent to which the actual habitat temperatures in alpine landscapes deviate from meteorological data at different spatia...
Conference Paper
Background/Question/Methods High elevation vegetation is commonly considered dominated by effects of low temperature with all other drivers of life such as carbon, water, and nutrient supply playing secondary roles. In this talk, this hierarchy will be questioned, given that temperatures are modified by vegetation and topography, offering a suite o...
Article
Rough mountain terrain offers climatic conditions (niches) to plants and animals poorly represented by conventional climate station data. However, the extent to which actual temperatures deviate from those of the freely circulating atmosphere had never been assessed at a landscape level. Here, we quantify thermal life conditions across topographica...

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