Giorgio Alberti

• Full professor at University of Udine

Spontaneous afforestation following land abandonment has been increasingly recognized as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change and provide measurable benefits to biodiversity. However, afforestation effects on biodiversity, particularly on soil microbial communities, are still poorly characterized, with most previous studies focusing o...

Protected areas (PAs) are expected to provide multiple ecosystem services (ESs), but quantitative assessments on their effectiveness in maintaining ESs are often lacking. This work aims to assess the effectiveness of PAs in delivering multiple ESs compared to unprotected areas (NPAs), while exploring trade-offs and synergies between ESs and their h...

The density of wood is a key indicator of the carbon investment strategies of trees, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here we analyse information from 1.1 mil...

Background Wildfires are increasingly impacting ecosystems worldwide especially in temperate dry habitats, often interplaying with other global changes (e.g., alien plant invasions). Understanding the ecological consequences of wildfires is crucial for effective conservation and management strategies. The aim of this study was to investigate the im...

Characterised by the presence of old and senescence trees, and providing several ecosystem services, old-growth forests are nowadays among the rarest European ecosystems. Despite the ecological importance of these forests, the small dimension of forest patches and the direct and indirect human actions, endangered these rare forests, so much so that...

The role of forests in providing multiple goods and services has been recognized worldwide. In such a context, reliable spatial predictions of forest attributes such as tree volume and current increment are fundamental for conducting forest monitoring, improving restoration programs, and supporting decision-making processes. This article presents t...

Wind disturbances are one of the main drivers of forest dynamics in Europe, shaping forest stands and modifying the ecosystem services provisioning. Salvage logging is often most common strategy adopted after a high-severity disturbance in managed stands. Understanding natural regeneration dynamics including their interaction with the logging opera...

The emergence of alternative stable states in forest systems has significant implications for the functioning and structure of the terrestrial biosphere, yet empirical evidence remains scarce. Here, we combine global forest biodiversity observations and simulations to test for alternative stable states in the presence of evergreen and deciduous for...

Background Carbon (C) sink and stock are among the most important ecosystem services provided by forests in climate change mitigation policies. In this context, old-growth forests constitute an essential reference point for the development of close-to-nature silviculture, including C management techniques. Despite their small extent in Europe, temp...

Introduction According to various censuses, Europe has less than 1.5 million ha of old-growth forests (OGF). Most of them are in the boreal zone, while their presence in the temperate zone is residual and fragmented.In the framework of the EU biodiversity strategy, it has been adopted a broad definition of OGF which includes late-seral forests and...

Spectral diversity (SD) in reflectance can be used to estimate plant taxonomic diversity (TD) according to the Spectral Variation Hypothesis (SVH). However, contrasting relationships between SD and TD have been reported by different studies. Indeed, multiple factors may affect SD, including spatial and spectral scales, vegetation characteristics an...

The density of wood is a key indicator of trees’ carbon investment strategies, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here, we analyze information from 1.1 million...

Fast-growing perennial trees such as Populus nigra L. are important species for wood, plywood, pulp, and bioenergy feedstock production, yet tree vigor in a changing climate is poorly understood. This research aimed to identify breeding targets for yield in water-limited environments, alongside unraveling the relationship between drought, yield, an...

Aim To determine the relationships between the functional trait composition of forest communities and environmental gradients across scales and biomes and the role of species relative abundances in these relationships. Location Global. Time period Recent. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We integrated species abundance records from worldw...

Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system¹. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests2–5 are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these est...

Understanding what controls global leaf type variation in trees is crucial for comprehending their role in terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, water and nutrient dynamics. Yet our understanding of the factors influencing forest leaf types remains incomplete, leaving us uncertain about the global proportions of needle-leaved, broadleaved, ever...

The estimation of plant taxonomic diversity (TD) based on spectral diversity (SD) in reflectance can be achieved through the so-called Spectral Variation Hypothesis (SVH). However, studies conducted in various habitats and using diverse sensors, methodologies and diversity indices have presented conflicting relationships between SD and TD. Several...

Determining the drivers of non-native plant invasions is critical for managing native ecosystems and limiting the spread of invasive species1,2. Tree invasions in particular have been relatively overlooked, even though they have the potential to transform ecosystems and economies3,4. Here, leveraging global tree databases5-7, we explore how the phy...

In plants the communication between organs is mainly carried out via the xylem and phloem. The concentration and the molecular species of some phytohormones, assimilates and inorganic ions that are translocated in the xylem vessel play a key role in the systemic nutritional signaling in plants. In this work the composition of the xylem sap of maize...

Fungus–resistant varieties are gathering attention all over viticultural areas owing to their contribution to sustainable management. Sustainable viticulture implies lower inputs in terms of pesticides and water. However, investigations on the physiological behavior of fungus–resistant varieties under drought stress have been seldom conducted so fa...

1. Biodiversity is an important component of natural ecosystems, with higher species richness often correlating with an increase in ecosystem productivity. Yet, this relationship varies substantially across environments, typically becoming less pronounced at high levels of species richness. However, species richness alone cannot reflect all importa...

Protected areas, established to preserve ecosystems and protect biodiversity, are essential for a stable and long-term provision of multiple ecosystem services (ESs). Nevertheless, there is not a decisive agreement on the effectiveness of onservation strategies in maintaining or enhancing ESs and preserve biodiversity. The aims of this study were t...

The LATEST Project aims at providing an exhaustive overview of education and training programs inAgTech as a basis to design multidisciplinary innovative, locally fine-tuned academic programs to develop, implement and adapt AgTech for European agricultural stakeholders – including manufacturers, farmers, public and private technical services – in t...

Chlorophyll (Chl)-deficient plants can potentially increase global surface albedo of mono-cropping systems, and simultaneously maintaining a similar photosynthetic efficiency by increasing light canopy penetration and thus lowering investment in pigments. However, some previous studies have shown that pale mutants might reduce productivity in field...

Soil respiration is one of the most important operations controlling carbon (C) erosion from territorial ecosystems and a useful index of whole underground allocation of C and stand efficiency. However, how tree species effects root (i.e., autotrophic respiration) and soil microbial respiration (i.e., heterotrophic respiration), based on precise ex...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most recognized global patterns of species richness exhibited across a wide range of taxa. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in the past two centuries to explain LDG, but rigorous tests of the drivers of LDGs have been limited by a lack of high-quality global species richness data. Here we...

Abstract Environmental DNA consists of species‐specific intracellular and extracellular fractions, whose content and information may not be similar in all environments. In forest soil, in particular, the biogeochemical fate of DNA originated by plant litter input has been extensively reviewed, but species‐specific persistence and distribution still...

In natural environments, plants are exposed to variable light conditions, but photosynthesis has been mainly studied at steady state and this might overestimate carbon (C) uptake at the canopy scale. To better elucidate the role of light fluctuations on canopy photosynthesis, we investigated how the chlorophyll content, and therefore the different...

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknow...

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknow...

Significance Tree diversity is fundamental for forest ecosystem stability and services. However, because of limited available data, estimates of tree diversity at large geographic domains still rely heavily on published lists of species descriptions that are geographically uneven in coverage. These limitations have precluded efforts to generate a g...

Photosynthesis has been mainly studied under steady-state conditions even though this assumption results inadequate for assessing the biochemical responses to rapid variations occurring in natural environments. The combination of mathematical models with available data may enhance the understanding of the dynamic responses of plants to fluctuating...

The N2-fixing shrub Amorpha fruticosa L. is rapidly spreading in the dry riparian natural grasslands of Europe, altering ecosystem functions and depleting plant diversity. Alteration of the N cycle represents the key factor involved in invasions by N2-fixing plants with cascading effects on plant species richness. We hypothesized that A. fruticosa...

Studying changes in partitioning of dry matter and nonstructural carbohydrates (NSC) content in both aboveground and underground perennial tissues in drought-affected grapevines could provide insights into plant response and carbon allocation strategies during stress periods. The analysis of soluble NSC and starch content in leaf petioles, due to t...

Background Obtaining instantaneous gas exchanges data is fundamental to gain information on photosynthesis. Leaf level data are reliable, but their scaling up to canopy scale is difficult as they are acquired in standard and/or controlled conditions, while natural environments are extremely dynamic. Responses to dynamic environmental conditions nee...

It has been recognized the need to consider some photosynthetic processes in their transient states since those are more representative of the natural environment. The combination of mathematical models with the available data provides a tool to understand the dynamic responses of plants to fluctuating environments and can be used to make predictio...

Humus forms are good indicators of environmental conditions and thus important in forest ecological processes. Altitudinal gradients are considered as natural laboratory for evaluating soil ecological processes and humus form distribution. The objective of this study was to evaluate the macromorphology of humus forms along an altitudinal gradient (...

Background Obtaining instantaneous gas exchanges data is fundamental to gain information on photosynthesis. Leaf level data are reliable, but their scaling up to canopy scale is difficult as they are acquired in standard and/or controlled conditions, while natural environments are extremely dynamic. Responses to dynamic environmental conditions nee...

Old-growth forests have an important role in maintaining animal and plant diversity, are important carbon (C) reservoirs and are privileged sites to study long-term plant physiological responses, long-term forest dynamics and climate change impact on forest ecosystems. Several studies have highlighted how old-living trees undergo age-related declin...

Recent studies have highlighted that higher species richness can increase the resistance and/or the resilience to disturbances and stresses. The present study quantifies the overall tree species richness effect on growth and intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) in three target tree species (i.e. Fraxinus excelsior, Juglans spp. and Prunus avium) a...

Sunlight absorbed at the Earth’s surface is re-emitted as longwave radiation. Increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases trap an increasing fraction of such heat, leading to global climate change. Here we show that when a chlorophyll (Chl)-deficient soybean mutant is grown in the field, the fraction of solar-irradiance...

Beech and hornbeam are two of the most common species in old-growth temperate forests. However, how these two species affect soil carbon (C), soil nitrogen (N) and soil microbial and enzymatic activities is still not well understood. Thus, the aim of the present study was to quantify the effects of beech and hornbeam on soil chemical, biochemical a...

Questions Understanding the mechanisms underlying the impacts of exotic plant invasions is a central issue in plant ecology. Considering the invasion process, any alteration of the nutrient cycle is of fundamental importance. We hypothesized that the woody N‐fixing invasive Amorpha fruticosa is indirectly depleting plant diversity by altering ecosy...

Passive measurement of sun‐induced chlorophyll fluorescence (F) represents the most promising tool to quantify changes in photosynthetic functioning on a large scale. However, the complex relationship between this signal and other photosynthesis‐related processes restricts its interpretation under stress conditions. To address this issue, we conduc...

Aims We assessed the impact of tree species richness (SR) and functional diversity (FD) on soil carbon (C) accumulation in plantations. Methods We selected six mixed plantations established in 1999 on continuous maize field soils. Plantations differed only in the number of species whereas climatic conditions, stand age, tree density and soil type...

Under current environmental changes, forest management is challenged to foster contrasting benefits from forests, such as continuous wood supply while preserving biomass production, biodiversity conservation, and contribution to climate change mitigation through atmospheric carbon sequestration. Although being found as globally important, estimates...

Plain Language Summary Plants are Earth's biggest contributor for cleaning the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and remove around one quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans each year. However, this contribution cannot be measured directly and has to be inferred or modelled on the basis of related parameters. This introduces large uncertainties...

2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. In this Letter, the middle initial of author G. J. Nabuurs was omitted, and he should have been associated with an additional affiliation: ‘Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands’ (now added as affiliation 18...

A spatially explicit global map of tree symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi reveals that climate variables are the primary drivers of the distribution of different types of symbiosis.

The Eddy Covariance method (EC) is widely used for measuring carbon (C) and energy fluxes at high frequency between the atmosphere and the ecosystem, but has some methodological limitations and a spatial restriction to an area, called a footprint. Remotely sensed information is usually used in combination with eddy covariance data in order to estim...

The linearity and scale-dependency of ecosystem biodiversity and productivity relationships (BPRs) have been under intense debate. In a changing climate, monitoring BPRs within and across different ecosystem types is crucial, and novel remote sensing tools such as the Sentinel-2 (S2) may be adopted to retrieve ecosystem diversity information and to...

In European lowlands, remnants of natural forests are rare, small, fragmented and often endangered. Most of the recent EU environmental policies have included such habitats in protected areas. However, nature conservation measures may conflict with traditional forest management, such as coppicing. We used a space-for-time approach to assess the eff...

On October 29, 2019, the Vaia storm hits the North-Eastern regions of Italy by wind gusts exceeding 200 km h-1. The forests in these regions have been seriously damaged. This contribution illustrates the methodology adopted in the emergency phase to estimate forest damages caused by Vaia storm, both in terms of damaged forest areas and growing stoc...

Background Grape leaves provide the biochemical substrates for berry development. Thus, understanding the regulation of grapevine leaf metabolism can aid in discerning processes fundamental to fruit development and berry quality. Here, the temporal alterations in leaf metabolism in Merlot grapevine grown under sufficient irrigation and water defici...

Questo documento si inserisce nel contesto delle attività previste dalla Scheda Foreste n. 22.2 del programma Rete Rurale Nazionale 2014-2020, volte a supportare e favorire la politica di sviluppo rurale attraverso: • supporto alla partecipazione del partenariato, delle organizzazioni e delle amministrazioni all’attuazione della politica di svilupp...

The present study assesses the stability of biochar, its effect on original soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition, and the interactions with plant roots over a 3-year period in a short rotation coppice plantation in Northern Italy. Biochar produced from gasification of maize silage (δ¹³C of biochar ≈ − 13.8‰) was applied into the soil of the plan...

We analysed 10 years (2008–2017) of continuous eddy covariance (EC) CO2 flux measurements of net ecosystem exchange (NEE) in a young pedunculate oak forest in Croatia. Measured NEE was gap-filled and partitioned into gross primary productivity (GPP) and ecosystem reparation (RECO) using the online tool by Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in...

High-resolution airborne thermal infrared (TIR) together with sun-induced fluorescence (SIF) and hyperspectral optical images (visible, near- and shortwave infrared; VNIR/SWIR) were jointly acquired over an experimental site. The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of these state-of-the-art remote sensing techniques for detecting...

Temperate forest productivity and functioning may be explained by complex interactions among tree canopy composition, topographic conditions, climate, morphogenetic identification and classification of humus forms. In this study, we report the main morphological feature of humus profiles classified according to both American (AHCM) and European (EH...

The photosynthetic, optical and morphological characteristics of a chlorophyll-deficient (Chl-deficient) “yellow” soybean mutant (MinnGold) were examined in comparison with two green varieties (MN0095 and Eiko). Despite the large difference in Chl content, similar leaf photosynthesis rates were maintained in the Chl-deficient mutant by offsetting t...

full paper can be downloaded here: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1Vo3T3JGmQvIL3 Many ecosystem processes in forest ecosystems are influenced by tree species richness and tree functional diversity (FD). Several studies, mainly in grasslands, have already underlined a positive effect of plant species richness on soil carbon (C) storage, but evidenc...

Post-veraison water deficit is a common strategy implemented to improve fruit composition in many winegrowing regions. However, contrasting results are often reported on fruit size and composition, a challenge for generalizing the positive impact of this technique. Our research investigated the effect of water deficit (WD) imposed at veraison on Me...

Keymessage Selective thinning is a more viable method for beech coppice conversion to high forest when compared with thinning from below as it enhances tree growth, reduces mortality of the remaining trees, and allows to obtain stands with a higher mechanical stability and larger crowns. Context Beech forests in North-East Italy have been largely...

Carbon stock in coastal seagrass ecosystems is estimated to be 4.2-8.4 Pg C. While covering less than 0.2% of the ocean floor, seagrasses store about 10% of the carbon buried in the oceans each year. However, such a potential contribution is reduced by the annual loss of seagrasses globally (-1.5% per year) mainly because of anthropogenic coastal d...

Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) has been proposed as an alternative method to pyrolysis for producing C-rich amendments for soil C sequestration. However, the use of hydrochar (HC) as soil amendment, is still controversial due to the limited information on the potential benefits and trade-offs that may follow its application into soil. This study...

This paper aims to evaluate the suitability of the ECOSSE model to estimate soil heterotrophic respiration (Rh) from arable land and short rotation coppices of poplar and willow. Between 2011 and 2013, we measured Rh with automatic closed dynamic chambers on root exclusion plots at one site in the UK (willow, mixed commercial genotypes of Salix spp...

Background and aimsSoil incorporation of charcoal (biochar) has been suggested as practice to sequester carbon, improve soil properties and crop yields but most studies have been done in the short term. Old anthropogenic charcoal-rich soils in the Alps enable to explore the long-term impact of charcoal addition to alpine grassland on seed germinati...

This study focuses on the morphological and chemical development of humus forms as a function of altitude and forest type in the Northern Iran. Terrestrial humus forms related to European Humus Group proposal (EHGP) were evaluated under six common forest types, i.e. Alnus subcordata (AS), Acer velutinum (AV), Fagus orientalis - Carpinus betulus (FC...

A common irrigation strategy is to replenish the soil water reservoir according to evapotranspiration (ET). However, the ET from plants under deficit irrigation is not well explored and is normally assumed to be a constant fraction of their respective well-watered condition. In the current experiment, we hypothesized that the ratio between the ET o...

Global biodiversity and productivity The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity has been explored in detail in herbaceous vegetation, but patterns in forests are far less well understood. Liang et al. have amassed a global forest data set from >770,000 sample plots in 44 countries. A positive and consistent relationship can be...