
Haben BlondeelGhent University | UGhent · Department of Environment
Haben Blondeel
PhD
About
52
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - present
April 2015 - October 2019
Publications
Publications (52)
Background and aims – Cinchona (Rubiaceae) tree bark is the key source of quinine alkaloids used as malaria treatment. Cinchona trees were introduced to Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in the early 20th century. Currently, the eastern DRC accounts for an estimated 55% of the global supply of quinine. The aim of this study is to obtain more i...
Mixed-species forests are proposed as strategy to increase the resistance and resilience of forests to drought stress. However, evidence suggest that increasing tree species richness does not consistently enhance tree growth responses to drought. Moreover, tree diversity effects under unprecedented multiyear droughts remain uncertain, calling for a...
Increasing tree diversity is considered a key management option to adapt forests to climate change. However, the effect of species diversity on a forest's ability to cope with extreme drought remains elusive. In this study, we assessed drought tolerance (xylem vulnerability to cavitation) and water stress (water potential), and combined them into a...
Light availability profoundly influences plant communities, especially below dense tree canopies in forests. Canopy disturbances, altering forest floor light conditions, together with other environmental changes such as climate change, nitrogen deposition and legacy effects from previous land‐use will simultaneously impact forest understorey commun...
This study delves into the diversity and composition of agroforestry species in Rwanda's Eastern Plateau and Eastern Savannah agro-ecological zones. Examining these systems across diverse landscapes is crucial for selecting species adapted to local conditions. We surveyed four landscapes with varying tree cover levels, using stratified random sampl...
Via sheltering, decoupling and buffering mechanisms, tree canopies have the capacity to mitigate impacts of multiple global‐change drivers on below‐canopy processes and organisms in forests. As a result, canopies have an important potential as nature‐based solution.
The optimal combinations of forest canopy structural attributes to jointly mitigate...
1. Enhancing tree diversity may be important to fostering resilience to drought-related climate extremes. So far, little attention has been given to whether tree diversity can increase the survival of trees and reduce its variability in young forest plantations. 2. We conducted an analysis of seedling and sapling survival from 34 globally distribut...
Questions
Increased soil phosphorus (P) availability in fertilized grasslands can drive both community degradation and delayed community recovery upon agricultural abandonment. Beyond describing grassland community patterns along gradients in P availability, it remains unclear how individual species with different strategies respond to increasing p...
Purpose of Review
International ambitions for massive afforestation and restoration are high. To make these investments sustainable and resilient under future climate change, science is calling for a shift from planting monocultures to mixed forests. But what is the scientific basis for promoting diverse plantations, and what is the feasibility of...
Plant communities are being exposed to changing environmental conditions all around the globe, leading to alterations in plant diversity, community composition, and ecosystem functioning. For herbaceous understorey communities in temperate forests, responses to global change are postulated to be complex, due to the presence of a tree layer that mod...
Species are altering their phenology to track warming temperatures. In forests, understorey plants experience tree canopy shading resulting in light and temperature conditions, which strongly deviate from open habitats. Yet, little is known about understorey phenology responses to forest microclimates.
We recorded flowering onset, peak, end and dur...
The microbial community structure in forest soils is expected to change in response to global environmental change, such as climate warming and nitrogen deposition. Community responses to these environmental changes may further interact with the site’s land-use history and understory light availability. Uncovering the relative importance of these g...
FAO’s most recent global synthesis on planted forests was released in 2009 and the last Unasylva on planted forests was published in 2005. Developed together with a coalition of external partners, including the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) task force on planted forests and the TreeDivNet network, Issue 254 hereby res...
Understanding the distinct impacts of temperature and light on seedling growth is crucial for predicting forest regeneration trajectories under future climate change and forest disturbance. This is because temperature and light can change independently or together, influencing the competitive status of tree seedlings and forest herbs. However, most...
In tropical Africa, a wide range of agroforestry practices exist, resulting in various configurations of trees in the landscape, with an unknown impact on ecosystem services. We evaluated tree occurrence, structure, and composition in agroforestry systems within four contrasting landscapes representing different levels of tree cover in peri-urban K...
The temperate forest understorey is rich in terms of vascular plant diversity and plays a vital functional role. Given the sensitivity of this forest layer to forest management and global environmental change and the limited knowledge on its long-term dynamics, there is a need for decision support systems that can guide temperate forest managers to...
Forest fragmentation increases the proportion of edge area and this, in turn, induces changes in forest structure,
species composition and microclimate. These factors are also strongly determined by the forest management
regime. Although the interactive effects of edges and density on forest plant communities have been extensively
studied, little i...
Global change is causing ecosystems to change at unprecedented rates and the urgency to quantify ecological change is high. We therefore need all possible sources of ecological data to address key knowledge gaps.
Ground‐based photos are a form of remote sensing and an unconventional data source with a high potential to improve our understanding of...
• Climate change, eutrophication and intensified forest management are affecting forest understorey plants, a major component of forest biodiversity. The main impacts of these drivers have often been studied, but we lack a good understanding of how key understorey species are affected by potential interactive effects of these drivers and which spec...
The vast majority of plant biodiversity associated with temperate forests is harboured by the understorey layer. This layer also plays crucial roles in ecosystem functions such as tree regeneration, nutrient cycling and carbon dynamics. Research using space‐for‐time substitutions and resurveys of vegetation plots has shown that climate warming, cha...
Numerous decision-makers have an interest in how forest biodiversity and functioning will alter under environmental change. These decision-makers may have varied motivations underlying their management response to environmental change by focusing on contrasting management challenges and targets. Decision-makers may use different tools to aid their...
The increasing prevalence of woody liana species has been widely observed across the neotropics, but observations from temperate regions are comparatively rare. On the basis of a resurvey database of 1814 (quasi‐)permanent plots from across 40 European study sites, with a median between‐survey interval of 38 years, and ranging from 1933 (earliest i...
Questions
Light availability at the forest floor affects many forest ecosystem processes, and is often quantified indirectly through easy‐to‐measure stand characteristics. We investigated how three such characteristics, basal area, canopy cover and canopy closure, were related to each other in structurally complex mixed forests. We also asked how w...
Increasing light availability by opening up the forest canopy is a key tool for forest managers to stimulate natural regeneration of trees. Tree seedlings are also impacted by a complex set of global change drivers and understorey vegetation. Here, we investigated if (altered) environmental resources and conditions due to global change, and underst...
Intraspecific trait variation (ITV; i.e. variability in mean and/or distribution of plant attribute values within species) can occur in response to multiple drivers. Environmental change and land‐use legacies could directly alter trait values within species but could also affect them indirectly through changes in vegetation cover. Increasing variab...
A central challenge of today's ecological research is predicting how ecosystems will develop under future global change. Accurate predictions are complicated by (a) simultaneous effects of different drivers, such as climate change, nitrogen deposition and management changes; and (b) legacy effects from previous land use.
We tested whether herb laye...
The understorey in temperate forests can play an important functional role, depending on its biomass and functional characteristics. While it is known that local soil and stand characteristics largely determine the biomass of the understorey, less is known about the role of global change. Global change can directly affect understorey biomass, but a...
Plant community composition and functional traits respond to chronic drivers such as climate change and nitrogen (N) deposition. In contrast, pulse disturbances from ecosystem management can additionally change resources and conditions. Community responses to combined environmental changes may further depend on land-use legacies. Disentangling the...
Aims
Disentangling direct and indirect effects of global change drivers on plant nitrogen (N) uptake in leaves is important for understanding species and community responses in a changing world.
Methods
We created understorey herb communities on forest soils with and without recent agricultural history. We traced pulse additions of ¹⁵NH4¹⁵NO3 with...
• Functional traits respond to environmental drivers, hence evaluating trait‐environment relationships across spatial environmental gradients can help to understand how multiple drivers influence plant communities. Global‐change drivers such as changes in atmospheric nitrogen deposition occur worldwide, but affect community trait distributions at t...
Human-induced environmental changes in temperature, light availability due to forest canopy management, nitrogen deposition, and land-use legacies can alter ecosystem processes such as litter decomposition. These influences can be both direct and indirect via altering the performance of understorey vegetation. To identify the direct and indirect ef...
Temperate forests cover 16% of the global forest area. Within these forests, the understorey is an important biodiversity reservoir that can influence ecosystem processes and functions in multiple ways. However, we still lack a thorough understanding of the relative importance of the understorey for temperate forest functioning. As a result, unders...
Anthropogenic activities have affected forests for centuries, leading to persistent legacies. Observations of agricultural legacies on forest soil properties have been site specific and contrasting. Sites and regions vary along gradients in intrinsic soil characteristics, phosphorus (P) management and nitrogen (N) deposition which could affect the...
Questions
Past agricultural land use and forest management have shaped and influenced the understorey composition in European forests for centuries. We investigated whether understorey vegetation assemblages are affected by (i) legacies from a historical infield/outland agricultural system (i.e. a system with nutrient‐enriched vs. nutrient‐depleted...
Land-use legacies are important for explaining present-day ecological patterns and processes. However, an overarching approach to quantify land-use history effects on ecosystem properties is lacking, mainly due to the scarcity of high-quality, complete and detailed data on past land use. We propose a general framework for quantifying the effects of...
Topsoil conditions in temperate forests are influenced by several soil-forming factors, such as canopy composition (e.g. through litter quality), land-use history, atmospheric deposition, and the parent material. Many studies have evaluated the effects of single factors on physicochemical topsoil conditions, but few have assessed the simultaneous e...
Understorey communities can dominate forest plant diversity and strongly affect forest ecosystem structure and function. Understoreys often respond sensitively but inconsistently to drivers of ecological change, including nitrogen (N) deposition. Nitrogen deposition effects, reflected in the concept of critical loads, vary greatly not only among sp...
The contemporary state of functional traits and species richness in plant communities depends on legacy effects of past disturbances. Whether temporal responses of community properties to current environmental changes are altered by such legacies is, however, unknown. We expect global environmental changes to interact with land-use legacies given d...
Elevated atmospheric input of nitrogen (N) is currently affecting plant biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The growth and survival of numerous plant species is known to respond strongly to N fertilisation. Yet, few studies have assessed the effects of N deposition on seed quality and reproductive performance, which is an important life‐history...
Pine plantations established on former heathland are common throughout Western Europe and North America. Such areas can continue to support high biodiversity values of the former heathlands in the more open areas, while simultaneously delivering ecosystem services such as wood production and recreation in the forested areas. Spatially optimizing wo...
More and more ecologists have started to resurvey communities sampled in earlier decades to determine long-term shifts in community composition and infer the likely drivers of the ecological changes observed. However, to assess the relative importance of and interactions among multiple drivers, joint analyses of resurvey data from many regions span...
One of the major challenges in ecology is to predict how multiple global environmental changes will affect future ecosystem patterns (e.g. plant community composition) and processes (e.g. nutrient cycling). Here, we highlight arguments for the necessary inclusion of land-use legacies in this endeavour. Alterations in resources and conditions engend...