Igor Drobyshev

Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences | SLU ·  Centre of Southern Swedish Forest Research

Sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marshall) growth in the species’ southern range has been declining since the 1980s, putting at risk a variety of ecosystem services that the species provides. Heatwaves, drought, frosts, acidic deposition, and insect defoliation, all reducing photosynthetic activity, have been suggested to be behind the phenomenon. Becau...

Slash-and-burn (SAB) was a widespread agricultural practice across large parts of the boreal region until the early 20th century. Despite its paramount importance in the procurement of food and particularly in supporting frontier populations of settlers during the colonization of the Eurasian boreal zone, analyses of spatial and temporal patterns i...

Weather and climate play an important role in shaping global wildfire regimes and geographical distributions of burnable area. As projected by the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR6), in the near future, fire danger is likely to increase in many regions due to warmer temperatures and drier conditions....

In recent years, the occurrence of a series devastating wildfire events around the world has raised considerable public concern about how climate change is altering meteorological conditions conducive to such events. The relative scarcity of wildfire attribution studies, coupled with the limited observational record, has added to the difficulty of...

Weather and climate play an important role in shaping global fire regimes and geographical distributions of burnable areas. At the global scale, fire danger is likely to increase in the near future due to warmer temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns, as projected by the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Cl...

Boreal vegetation is influenced by multiple factors such as climate and fire, but interactions between long- and short-term effects of climate upon fire activity are complex and remain poorly studied, especially in Eurasia. To understand the relationships between climate, fire and vegetation in Eurasia, we reconstruct the climate changes during the...

Background Drivers of fire regimes vary among spatial scales, and fire history reconstructions are often limited to stand scales, making it difficult to partition effects of regional climate forcing versus individual site histories. Aims To evaluate regional-scale historical fire regimes over 350 years, we analysed an extensive fire-scar network, s...

The Old Wood in a New Light database project focuses on the digitization and accessibility of the results of dendrochronological samples analyzed and archived at four Swedish university-based tree-ring laboratories at Lund University, Stockholm University, University of Gothenburg, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Collaboration...

Understanding drivers of boreal forest dynamics supports adaptation strategies in the context of climate change. We aimed to understand how burn rates varied since the early 1700s in North American boreal forests. We used 16 fire-history study sites distributed across such forests and investigated variation in burn rates for the historical period s...

Weather and climate play an important role in shaping global wildfire regimes and geographical distributions of burnable area. As projected by the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR6), in the near future, fire danger is likely to increase in many regions due to warmer temperatures and drier conditions....

Understanding how burn rates vary over time and space is fundamental to support research on drivers of forest dynamics and elaborate adaptation strategies in the context of climate change. Using 16 fire-history study sites distributed across North American boreal forests, we investigated variation in historical burn rates from 1700–1990. These were...

Fire regimes in North American forests are diverse and modern fire records are often too short to capture important patterns, trends, feedbacks, and drivers of variability. Tree‐ring fire scars provide valuable perspectives on fire regimes, including centuries‐long records of fire year, season, frequency, severity, and size. Here, we introduce the...

In response to the occurrence of a number of large wildfire events across the world in recent years, the question of the extent to which climate change may be altering the meteorological conditions conducive to wildfires has become a hot topic of debate. Despite the development of attribution methodologies for extreme events in the last decade, att...

Understanding long‐term forest fire histories of boreal landscapes is instrumental for parameterizing climate‐fire interactions and the role of humans affecting natural fire regimes. The eastern sections of the European boreal zone currently lack a network of annually resolved and centuries‐long forest fire histories. To fill in this knowledge gap,...

The mechanistic pathways connecting ocean-atmosphere variability and terrestrial productivity are well-established theoretically, but remain challenging to quantify empirically. Such quantification will greatly improve the assessment and prediction of changes in terrestrial carbon sequestration in response to dynamically induced climatic extremes....

Purpose Mycorrhizal fungi are critical for the growth and survival of trees although the knowledge on the extent of their association with different tree species in the boreal forest remains limited. Methods We examined the vertical distribution and composition of the root mycorrhizal communities of black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P) and t...

Increasing air temperatures and changing precipitation patterns due to climate change can affect tree growth in boreal forests. Periodic insect outbreaks affect the growth trajectory of trees, making it difficult to quantify the climate signal in growth dynamics at scales longer than a year. We studied climate-driven growth trends and the influence...

The spatial component of past forest fires in temperate Europe has been little studied, despite the value of such data in quantifying human and natural factors driving fire activity and associated forest dynamics. Changes in fire regimes reported across a range of ecosystems call for a better understanding of variability in historic fires and may h...

The meteorological conditions that coincided with extreme wildfires in Siberia during 2020 were up to 80% more likely than a century ago as a result of global warming.

Dendrochronological reconstructions inform us about historical climate-fire-human interactions, providing a means to calibrate projections of future fire hazard. Most of these reconstructions, however, have been developed in landscapes with a considerable proportion of xeric sites that could potentially inflate our estimates of the historic levels...

Understanding factors driving fire activity helps reveal the degree and geographical variability in the resilience of boreal vegetation to large scale climate forces. We studied the association between sea ice cover in the Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea and observational records of forest fires in two Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) over 1913...

Fire is a major disturbance agent in the boreal forest, affecting the structure, dynamics and biogeochemical cycles in this biome. In the Asian section of boreal forest, the records of long-term fire history are few that limits our understanding of factors forcing regional fire dynamics. We presented an annually-resolved 352-year (1666–2017) fire c...

Fire remains one of the main natural disturbance factors in the European boreal zone and understanding climatic forcing on fire activity is important for projecting effects of climate change on ecosystem services in this region. We analyzed records of annually burned areas in 16 administrative regions of the European boreal zone (countries or admin...

In this study, we analyse the role of climate change in the forest fires that raged through large parts of Sweden in the summer of 2018 from a meteorological perspective. This is done by studying the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) based on sub-daily data, both in reanalysis data sets (ERA-Interim, ERA5, the Japanese 55 year Reanalysis, JRA-55, a...

Forest monitoring studies show contrasting trends in tree growth rates since the mid-twentieth century. However, due to their focus on annual and decadal dynamics, they provide limited insight into the effects of long-term climatic variability on tree growth. Here, we relied on a large tree-ring dataset (∼2,700 trees) of two common North American s...

In northern Europe, a long history of human exploitation effectively eliminated legacies of natural disturbances in mixed oak forests and we currently lack understanding of the role of natural disturbance factors in affecting oak regeneration into the forest canopies. We compiled dendrochronological, observational and paleochrono-logical data from...

The Sala fire in the Västmanland County of central Sweden that burned about 14,000 ha in 2014 has been the largest fire recorded in the modern history of Sweden. To understand the long-term fire history of this area, we dendrochronologically dated fire scars on Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) trees (live and deadwood) to reconstruct the fire cycle...

The influence of landscape features on the occurrence and size of forest fires in Northern Europe has not been well-studied. In this paper, we analyzed the impact of human-related landscape properties (road and human population density), biotic features (amount of firebreak area and vegetation zone) and fire weather indices (Buildup Index, BUI and...

Aim Documenting past vegetation dynamics and fire‐vegetation relationships at a regional scale is necessary to understand the mechanisms that control the functioning of the boreal forest, which is particularly sensitive to climate change. The objective of this study is to document these interactions in the Komi Republic during the Holocene. Locati...

We evaluated the skills of different palaeofire reconstruction techniques to reconstruct the fire history of a boreal landscape (Russian Karelia) affected by surface fires. The analysis of dated lacustrine sediments from two nearby lakes was compared with independent dendrochronological dating of fire scars, methods which have rarely been used in c...

This study explored the underground interactions between black spruce and trembling aspen in pure and mixed stands to understand how their soil resource use help these species coexist in the boreal mixedwoods of Western Quebec. We analyzed species-specific fine root foraging strategies (root biomass and root tissue density) along three soil layers...

Spatially explicit reconstructions of fire activity in European boreal forest are rare, which limits our understanding of factors driving vegetation dynamics in this part of the boreal domain. We have developed a spatially explicit dendrochronological reconstruction of a fire regime in a 25 × 50 km 2 area within boreal biome located within the Kale...

The role of future forests in global biogeochemical cycles will depend on how different tree species respond to climate. Interpreting the response of forest growth to climate change requires an understanding of the temporal and spatial patterns of seasonal climatic influences on the growth of common tree species. We constructed a new network of 310...

The circulation strength of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre varies on a range of timescales, it regulates the northwards oceanic heat transport and influences weather and climate over Scandinavia. We test the hypothesis that persistent atmospheric circulation anomalies favorable for extensive forest fire activity in the northern Scandinavian borea...

The ability to predict forest fire risk at monthly, seasonal, and above‐annual time scales is critical to mitigate its impacts, including fire‐driven dynamics of ecosystem and socio‐economic services. Fire is the primary driving factor of the ecosystem dynamics in the boreal forest, directly affecting global carbon balance and atmospheric concentra...

Abstract. Understanding intra-specific variation in climate sensitivity could improve the prediction of tree responses to climate change. We attempted to identify the degree of genetic control of tree phenology and growth of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Mchx.) in a natural stand of this species in northwestern Quebec. We mapped and genotype...

In this study we analyse the role of climate change in the forest fires that raged through large parts of Sweden in the summer of 2018 from a meteorological perspective. This is done by studying the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) based on sub-daily data, both in reanalysis datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA5, JMA55 and MERRA2) and three large ensemble c...

In many boreal regions of Russia the past natural variability of forest fire activity remains largely undocumented, preventing accurate assessment of the impact of current climate warming on forest ecosystem dynamics. This study aims to reconstruct the Holocene fire history of the northern Ural mountain foothills, in the Komi Republic, based on ana...

Fire has been shown to shape successional pathways and dynamics of forest vegetation. However, its role in European hemiboreal forests remains poorly understood. Here we provide the first annually resolved reconstruction of fire history from the Eastern Baltic Sea region, developed in the pine-dominated landscape of Slitere National Park (SNP), nor...

Climate change modulates cold-marginal forest ecosystems through changing growth constraints. Understanding spatiotemporal variations in climate–growth relationships is essential to project forest ecosystem dynamics, and climate–environmental feedbacks. We explored variations in growth and climate–growth relationships, along the Arctic margin in no...

Significance The metabolism of North America’s oldest boreal trees ( Thuja occidentalis L.) is strongly affected by rising anthropogenic C O 2 emissions. Intrinsic water use efficiency ( i W U E ) increased dramatically, although nonlinearly, since the beginning of the industrial Era. Our study shows that while T. occidentalis L. acclimated to risi...

The expansion of spruce-dominated forestry in Southern Sweden during the twentieth century has led to a considerable amount of oak (Quercus robur L.) woodlands being converted into stands dominated by planted spruce. The thinning of spruces around oak trees is currently done in Sweden to improve local diversity of insects, oak growing conditions an...

There is mounting evidence that species diversity increases the temporal stability of forest growth. This stabilising effect of diversity has mainly been attributed to species differences in their response to fluctuating environmental conditions. Interactions among individuals could also contribute to the stabilising effect of diversity by increasi...

Climatically controlled allocation to reproduction is a key mechanism by which climate influences tree growth and may explain lagged correlations between climate and growth. We used continent-wide datasets of tree-ring chronologies and annual reproductive effort in Fagus sylvatica from 1901-2015 to characterise relationships between climate, reprod...

The growth of high-latitude temperature-limited boreal forest ecosystems is projected to become more constrained by soil water availability with continued warming. The purpose of this study was to document ongoing shifts in tree growth sensitivity to the evolving local climate in unmanaged black spruce (Picea mariana (Miller) B.S.P.) forests of eas...

In Northern Europe, human activities have caused a substantial decrease in the number of old deciduous trees over the last two centuries, leading to a decline in species populations associated with this habitat. One way to mitigate this trend is to increase the abundance of mature and old deciduous trees in commercial forests, such as by tree reten...

Forest fires are a key disturbance in boreal forests, and characteristics of fire regimes are among the most important factors explaining the variation in forest structure and species composition. The occurrence of fire is connected with climate, but earlier, mostly local scale studies in the northern European boreal forests have provided little in...

The mid-20th century changes in North Atlantic Ocean dynamics, e.g. slow-down of the Atlantic meridional overturning thermohaline circulation (AMOC), have been considered as early signs of tipping points in the Earth climate system. We hypothesized that these changes have significantly altered boreal forest growth dynamics in northeastern North Ame...

Disentangling the high- and low-frequency effect of climate oscillations on synchronous seed production would improve our understanding of masting as an ecological process. We show for century-long data that inter-annual and decadal changes of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) drove continent-wide masting of Fagus sylvatica L. (European beech)....

The length of the fire cycle is a critical factor affecting the vegetation cover in boreal and temperate regions. However, its responses to climate change remain poorly understood. We reanalyzed data from earlier studies of forest age structures at the landscape level, in order to map the evolution of regional fire cycles across Eastern North Ameri...

This poster was presented during the MedPalyno Symposium (Septembre 2017, Barcelona) to the community of palynologists whose research area is predominantly in the Mediterranean region. It presents the PREREAL project, my thesis objectives and the first results obtained concerning the fire history of the Holocene in the Republic of Komi.

Mast seeding is a crucial population process in many tree species, but its spatio-temporal patterns and drivers at the continental scale remain unknown . Using a large dataset (8000 masting observations across Europe for years 1950–2014) we analysed the spatial pattern of masting across the entire geographical range of European beech, how it is inf...

Mast seeding is a crucial population process in many tree species, but its spatio‐temporal patterns and drivers at the continental scale remain unknown . Using a large dataset (8000 masting observations across Europe for years 1950–2014) we analysed the spatial pattern of masting across the entire geographical range of European beech, how it is inf...

We investigated whether the gap disturbance rate (percent area disturbed by canopy gaps per year) differed at the northern range limit of sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.) – yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis Britton) forests compared to broadleaf temperate deciduous forests located more to the south. As an ancillary question, we assessed the re...