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Introduction
I am having a broad interest in forest ecology and management, and I am increasingly specializing in forest-climate feedbacks. My most distinctive expertise is in process-based forest landscape and disturbance modeling.
Publications
Publications (58)
Forest ecosystems have been in focus of nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change. Forests constitute the largest terrestrial carbon sink and absorb about one-quarter of anthropogenic carbon emissions. The climate-regulating function of forests is not restricted to carbon. While some other services, such as the storage of methane and nitrou...
The structural complexity index (SCI) has become an important metric for forest managers to monitor ecosystem services and conservation value in a wide variety of forest types. In this study, we developed an SCI for an unmanaged mixed Fagus orientalis Lipsky forest in northern Iran, which incorporated structural information specific to mature and o...
Environmental and socioeconomic developments induce land-use changes with potentially negative impacts on human well-being. To counteract undesired developments, a profound understanding of the complex relationships between drivers, land use, and ecosystem services is needed. Yet, national studies examining extended time periods are still rare. Bas...
Climate change is projected to have profound impacts on Canada’s Acadian Forest Region (AFR). However, large uncertainties arising from climate change and increasing disturbance activity pose challenges for forest management decisions. Process-based (mechanistic) simulation models offer a means by which vulnerabilities and different management stra...
Droughts have intensified in Central Europe and will likely become a major driver of forest ecosystem change in the future. Regional studies are needed to understand drought impacts on forests and to provide guidance for adaptive management. In this study, we have investigated the effects of an extraordinary drought period in 2018 – 2020 on tree gr...
As climate continues to change, disturbances may increasingly navigate forest ecosystems towards tipping points, causing irreversible state shifts and a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In this review, I elaborate the Special Issue topic ‘Natural disturbances as tipping points of forest ecosystems under climate change’ featured by Fores...
Die Zunahme von Störungen ist eine grosse Herausforderung für die Forstwirtschaft. Im Extremfall können Kipppunkte erreicht werden, die das Ökosystem grundlegend verändern und einen Verlust von Ökosystemleistungen und Biodiversität mit sich bringen. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt auf, wie die Anfälligkeit von Wäldern gesenkt, deren Anpassungsfähigke...
Invasive species that are closely related to each other may have similar population dynamics and, therefore, be controlled by targeting similar life stages. We studied two invasive knapweed species, spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe subsp. micranthos) and the hybrid meadow knapweed complex ( Centaurea × moncktonii ) in New York, USA, to determine...
Over the last decades, the natural disturbance is increasingly putting pressure on European forests. Shifts in disturbance regimes may compromise forest functioning and the continuous provisioning of ecosystem services to society, including their climate change mitigation potential. Although forests are central to many European policies, we lack th...
Unlabelled:
With progressing climate change, increasing weather extremes will endanger tree regeneration. Canopy openings provide light for tree establishment, but also reduce the microclimatic buffering effect of forests. Thus, disturbances can have both positive and negative impacts on tree regeneration. In 2015, three years before an extreme dr...
Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Disturbances can have multiple, often negative, effects on ecosystem services. Primary production is temporarily reduced by disturbances, while water and nutrient cycles are stimulated by disturbances. Consequently, the production of plant biomass (wood, animal fodder) may be tempor...
Forests are one of the most important components of the global carbon cycle. Consequently, forest protection as a nature-based climate solution has garnered increasing interest. Protected areas instated to safeguard biodiversity provide an opportunity to maximize carbon storage in situ, with important co-benefits between conservation and climate ch...
In Europe, forest management has controlled forest dynamics to sustain commodity production over multiple centuries. Yet over‐regulation for growth and yield diminishes resilience to environmental stress as well as threatens biodiversity, leading to increasing forest susceptibility to an array of disturbances. These trends have stimulated interest...
Observational evidence suggests that forests in the Northern Alps are changing at an increasing rate as a consequence of climate change. Yet, it remains unclear whether the acceleration of forest change will continue in the future, or whether downregulating feedbacks will eventually decouple forest dynamics from climate change. Here we studied futu...
Climate change alters forest development pathways, with consequences for ecosystem services and biodiversity. As the rate of warming increases, ecosystem change is expected to accelerate. However, ecosystem dynamics can have many causes unrelated to climate (for example, disturbance and stand development legacies). The compound effects of multiple...
Questions
Primary forests fulfil important roles in preserving biodiversity, storing carbon and increasing ecological understanding. Yet, they have become very rare in Europe. An important policy goal is thus to increase the share of naturally developing forests by creating protected areas in formerly managed forests. Here, we investigated (1) if a...
Changing forest disturbance regimes pose a major challenge for current day forestry. Yet our understanding of the economic impacts of disturbances remains incomplete. Existing valuations of losses from natural disturbances commonly exclude extreme events and neglect impacts on standing timber. Here we develop a new methodology to assess the economi...
Functional diversity (FD), represented by plant traits, is fundamentally linked to an ecosystem's capacity to respond to environmental change. Yet, little is known about the spatial distribution of FD and its drivers. These knowledge gaps prevent the development of FD-based forest management approaches to increase the trait diversity insurance (i.e...
More frequent and severe disturbances increasingly open the forest canopy and initiate tree regeneration. Simultaneously, increasing weather extremes, such as drought and heat, are threatening species adapted to cool and moist climate. The magnitude of the microclimatic buffering capacity of forest canopies to mitigate hot and dry weather condition...
Disturbance-based silviculture is of increasing interest as an approach to provide multiple ecosystem services and beta diversity in habitat conditions. One such approach increasingly employed in the eastern U.S. is a set of forestry practices developed to diversify forested bird habitats, called Silviculture with Birds in Mind (SBM). While strongl...
Including biodiversity assessments in forest management planning is becoming increasingly important due to the importance of biodiversity for forest ecosystem resilience provision and sustainable functioning. Here we investigated the potential to include biodiversity indicators into forest management planning in Europe. In particular, we aimed to (...
Increased wildfire activity in the Himalayan Mountains due to climate change may place rural livelihoods at risk, yet potential climate change effects on forest fires in this region are poorly investigated. Here we use Bhutan's blue pine (Pinus wallichiana) ecosystems to study the sensitivity of fire behavior to climatic changes. Wildland fires are...
ContextThe contribution of forest understory to the temperate forest carbon sink is not well known, increasing the uncertainty in C cycling feedbacks on global climate as estimated by Earth System Models.Objectives
We aimed at quantifying the effect of woody and non-woody understory vegetation on net ecosystem production (NEP) for a forested area o...
Throughout the United States, many institutions of higher education own forested tracts, often called school forests, which they use for teaching, research, and demonstration purposes. These school forests provide a range of benefits to the communities in which they are located. However, because administration is often decoupled from research and t...
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...
Background. Uncertainty about climate change impacts on forests can hinder mitigation and
adaptation actions. Scientific enquiry typically involves assessments of uncertainties, yet different
uncertainty components emerge in different studies. Consequently, inconsistent understanding of
uncertainty among different climate impact studies (from the i...
Uncertainty about climate change impacts on forests can hinder mitigation and adaptation actions. Scientific enquiry typically involves assessments of uncertainties, yet different uncertainty components emerge in different studies. Consequently, inconsistent understanding of uncertainty among different climate impact studies (from the impact analys...
Elements of forest structure are fundamentally associated with an array of ecosystem services and habitat characteristics. However, forest structure varies, in particular, through interactions with natural and human disturbances. Both variation in structural characteristics and associated relationships with ecosystem service outcomes have been poor...
Climate change threatens the provisioning of forest ecosystem services and biodiversity (ESB). The climate sensitivity of ESB may vary with forest development from young to old‐growth conditions as structure and composition shift over time and space. This study addresses knowledge gaps hindering implementation of adaptive forest management strategi...
Key message
Douglas-fir growth correlates with the climate, the soil moisture regime, and the soil nutrient status, reflecting a broad physiological amplitude. Even though planting this non-native tree species is suggested as a viable strategy to improve adaptiveness of European forests to a more extreme climate and to assure future productivity, t...
Forest ecosystems play an important role in the global climate
system and are thus intensively discussed in the context of climate change
mitigation. Over the past decades temperate forests were a carbon (C) sink to
the atmosphere. However, it remains unclear to which degree this C uptake is
driven by a recovery from past land use and natural distu...
The ability of forests to continuously provide ecosystem services (ES) is threatened by rapid changes in climate and disturbance regimes. Consequently, these changes present a considerable challenge for forest managers. Management of forests often focuses on maximizing the level of ES provisioning over extended time frames (i.e., rotation periods o...
Climate change will alter forest ecosystems and their provisioning of services. Forests in the Carpathian Mountains store high amounts of carbon and provide livelihoods to local people; however, no study has yet assessed their future long-term dynamics under climate change. Therefore, we selected a representative area of 1340 km2 to investigate the...
Forest ecosystems play an important role in the global climate system, and are thus intensively discussed in the context of climate change mitigation. Over the past decades temperate forests were a carbon (C) sink to the atmosphere. However, it remains unclear to which degree this C uptake is driven by a recovery from past disturbances vs. ongoing...
Logging to “salvage” economic returns from forests affected by natural disturbances has become increasingly prevalent globally. Despite potential negative effects on biodiversity, salvage logging is often conducted, even in areas otherwise excluded from logging and reserved for nature conservation, inter alia because strategic priorities for post‐d...
In order to prevent irreversible impacts of climate change on the biosphere it is imperative to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Consequently, the provisioning of renewable resources such as timber and biomass from forests is an ecosystem service of increasing importance. However, risk factors such as changing disturbance regimes are challenging...
Forest disturbances are sensitive to climate. However, our understanding of disturbance dynamics in response to climatic changes remains incomplete, particularly regarding large-scale patterns, interaction effects and dampening feedbacks. Here we provide a global synthesis of climate change effects on important abiotic ( re, drought, wind, snow and...
Currently, the temperate forest biome cools the earth's climate and dampens anthropogenic climate change. However, climate change will substantially alter forest dynamics in the future, affecting the climate regulation function of forests. Increasing natural disturbances can reduce carbon uptake and evaporative cooling, but at the same time increas...
Description of the ongoing interdisciplinary study of human adaptation to climate change in Bohdanska Dolyna, Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains.
Forest disturbances are sensitive to climate. However, our understanding of disturbance dynamics in response to climatic changes remains incomplete, particularly regarding large-scale patterns, interaction effects and dampening feedbacks. Here we provide a global synthesis of climate change effects on important abiotic (fire, drought, wind, snow an...
Forest disturbances are sensitive to climate. However, our understanding of disturbance dynamics in response to climatic changes remains incomplete, particularly regarding large-scale patterns, interaction effects and dampening feedbacks. Here we provide a global synthesis of climate change effects on important abiotic (fire, drought, wind, snow an...
The rates of anthropogenic climate change substantially exceed those at which forest ecosystems - dominated by immobile, long-lived organisms - are able to adapt. The resulting maladaptation of forests has potentially detrimental effects on ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, as many forest-dwelling species are highly dependent on the prevailing tr...
Appendix S2. Database of disturbance impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity derived from the literature.
Fig. S1. Reported disturbance effects on biodiversity and ecosystem service categories (following the definition of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005): (A) biodiversity, (B) supporting services, (C) provisioning services, (D) regulation services and (E) cultural services. N indicates the number of observations.
Appendix S1. Indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem services and their respective synonyms used in the literature search.
In many parts of the world forest disturbance regimes have intensified recently, and future climatic changes are expected to amplify this development further in the coming decades. These changes are increasingly challenging the main objectives of forest ecosystem management, which are to provide ecosystem services sustainably to society and maintai...
1. The ongoing changes to climate challenge the conservation of forest biodiversity. Yet, in thermally limited systems, such as temperate forests, not all species groups might be affected negatively. Furthermore, simultaneous changes in the disturbance regime have the potential to mitigate climate-related impacts on forest species. Here, we (i) inv...
Forest disturbance regimes have intensified in many parts of the world in recent decades, and are an increasing problem for managers concerned with the sustainable and continuous provisioning of forest ecosystem services. In order to address these changes an improved understanding of disturbance regimes is needed, particularly with regard to their...
