Juan A. Blanco

Universidad Pública de Navarra | UPNA · Natural Environment Sciences

Litterfall dynamics (production, seasonality and nutrient composition) are key factors influencing nutrient cycling. Leaf litter characteristics are modified by species composition, site conditions and water availability. However, significant evidence on how large‐scale, global circulation patterns affect ecophysiological processes at tree and ecos...

Tree species alter soil properties, potentially modifying forest nutrients cycling. In the current management context in which mixed species forests are favoured over monocultures due to their biodiversity and productivity-related advantages, the assessment of species effects on soils, as well as their interactions with other species, gains increas...

Forest thinning can significantly affect hydrological processes. However, these effects largely vary with forest types, climate, thinning intensity, and hydrological variables of interest. Understanding these effects and their variations can significantly support thinning treatments' design and selection to ensure desired hydrological benefits. In...

Purpose of Review: Forest models are becoming essential tools in forest research, management, and policymaking but currently are under deep transformation. In this review of the most recent literature (2018-2022), we aim to provide an updated general view of the main topics currently attracting the efforts of forest modelers, the trends already in...

We compiled and presented a dataset for all timber species reported in the Amazon region from all nine South American Amazonian countries. This was based on official information from every country, as well as from two substantial scientific references. We verified the standard taxonomic names from each individual source, using the Taxonomic Name Re...

PRimeros resutlados del proyecto SilvAdapt-MODEL

Forest growth models are increasingly being used in forestry and ecology research as predictive tools to help developing practical guidelines and to improve understanding of the drivers of forest ecosystem functioning. Models are usually calibrated using parameters directly obtained or estimated from empirical field observation, and hence are subje...

Monográfico sobre Manglares de las Américas

9ª Edición de la Escuela de verano de Ecología de Navarra – Jugando con la Ecología

We compiled and presented a dataset (named "MADERA") for all timber species reported in the Amazon region from all nine South American Amazonian countries. This work was based on official information from every country and on two substantial scientific references. Our final Amazonian timber species dataset contains 1,112 unique species records, whi...

Homenaje a Fernando González Bernáldez

Boreal forests play a crucial role in the global carbon (C) cycle and in climate stabilization. To better predict global C budgets, it is important to accurately estimate the size of forest C pools, and to identify the factors affecting them. We used national forest inventory data for the Greater Khingan Mountains, northeast China from 1999 to 2018...

Soils store an important amount of carbon (C), mostly in the form of organic matter in different decomposing stages. Hence, understanding the factors that rule the rates at which decomposed organic matter is incorporated into the soil is paramount to better understand how C stocks will vary under changing atmospheric and land use conditions. We stu...

Premio al mejor revisor de Ecosistemas y reconocimiento a editores invitados del bienio 2021-2022

Forests are essential in regulating global carbon and water cycles and are critical in mitigating climate change. Water-use efficiency, defined by the ratio of plant productivity per unit water use, is widely used to quantify the interactions between forest carbon and water cycles and could be potentially used to manage the carbon and water tradeof...

Nota sobre la 8ª Edición de la Escuela de verano de Ecología de Navarra – Ecólogas/os por un día

Proactive silviculture treatments (e.g., thinning) may increase C sequestration contributing to climate change mitigation, although, there are still questions about this effect in Mediterranean pine forests. The aim of this research was to quantify the storage of biomass and soil organic carbon in Pinus forests along a climatic gradient from North...

Adaptive forest management (AFM) is an urgent need because of the uncertainty regarding how changes in the climate will affect the structure, composition and function of forests during the next decades. Current research initiatives for the long-term monitoring of impacts of silviculture are scattered and not integrated into research networks, with...

Forest succession is an ecological phenomenon that can span centuries. Although the concept of succession was originally formulated as a deterministic sequence of different plant communities by F. Clements more than a century ago, nowadays it is recognized that stochastic events and disturbances play a pivotal role in forest succession. In spite of...

Natural and anthropogenic factors affect forest structure worldwide, primarily affecting forest canopy and its light properties. However, not only stand-replacing events modify canopy structure, but disturbances of lower intensity can also have important ecological implications. To study such effects, we analyzed long-term changes in light properti...

For several centuries, the mining and mineral processing industry has been the basis of the economy of the department of Oruro in Bolivia, and apparently, it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, and these efforts, over many years, have made a considerable damage to the environment. Specifically, in this research work, the effects of h...

Durante varios siglos, la industria minera y de procesamiento de minerales ha sido la base de la economía del departamento de Oruro en Bolivia, y aparentemente, continuará siéndolo en un futuro previsible. Estas labores, a lo largo de muchos años, han hecho un considerable daño al medio ambiente. En concreto, en el presente trabajo de investigación...

Recent research has shown that climate change is already altering tree species ranges, mortality and growth rates [...]

Hybrid poplar plantations are becoming increasingly important as a source of income for farmers in northwestern Spain, as rural depopulation and farmers aging prevent landowners from planting other labor-intensive crops. However, plantation owners, usually elderly and without formal forestry background, lack of simple tools to estimate the size and...

Climate change is having impacts on the biodiversity and structure of many ecosystems. In this chapter, we focus on its impacts on forests. We will focus on how the potential climate change impacts on forest biodiversity and structure will have a reflection on the ecosystem services provided by forests, and therefore on the capacity of these ecosyst...

The promotion of mixed forests represents an adaptation strategy in forest management to cope with climate change. The mixing of tree species with complementary ecological traits may modify forest functioning regarding productivity, stability, or resilience against disturbances. Litter decomposition is an important process for global carbon and nut...

Hybrid poplar plantations are becoming increasingly important as a source of income for farmers in the Duero Basin (northwestern Spain), as rural depopulation and farmers aging prevent them from planting other labor-intensive crops. However, forest owners, usually elderly and without formal forestry backgrounds, lack of simple tools to estimate the...

Background and Objectives: The forest in the Southwestern Pyrenees Mountains (Northern Spain) is mainly composed of pure Pinus sylvestris L. or a mix of P. sylvestris and Fagus sylvatica L. The most common forest management technique to harvest pine is the application of forest thinning with different intensities. It promotes a change in the forest...

El cambio climático, la expansión urbanística o el aumento del uso recreativo en zonas forestales están aumentando la probabilidad de ocurrencia de incendios forestales. Las comunidades rurales pueden afrontar la oportunidad de combinar actividades silvícolas para reducir el riesgo de incendios con el desarrollo energético basado en el aprovechamie...

Research Highlights: Thinning and tree species alter the forest floor microclimate by modifying canopy cover, radiation, wind, and humidity. Thus, forest management can directly influence the edaphic mesofauna responsible for decomposing coarse woody debris (CWD). Background and Objectives: This research was carried out in the Southwestern Pyrenees...

Tree age (AGE) and stocking degree (P) strongly influence tree shape, but their effects have been neglected in most tree profile equations. In addition, data used to build traditional tree profile equations usually do not meet the statistical requirements of independence and identical distribution of observations. Therefore, our main objectives wer...

Estimating timber volume and carbon stock in forests is fundamental for silviculture and for accurate estimation of national and global carbon budgets. Taper models are important tools for predicting diameter at any height along a tree bole. Mean annual temperature (MAT) and mean annual precipitation (MAP) influence tree growth, but their precise e...

This chapter reviews how global change affects forest-water interactions and water availability to ecosystems and people and synthesises current understanding of the implications of present and anticipated changes to forests and tree cover for local and global hydrology. Forest cover has declined in the past half-century, despite an increase in pla...

Forests and trees are key to solving water availability problems in the face of climate change and to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A recent global assessment of forest and water science posed the question: How do forests matter for water? Here we synthesize science from that assessment, which shows that forests and wa...

Isolating the long-term fertilization effect of CO2 from other climate-and site-related effects on tree growth has been proven a challenging task. To isolate long-term effects of [CO2] on water use efficiency at ecosystem level, we used the FORECAST Climate forest model, calibrated for Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) forests in the southwestern Py...

Schoenoplectus californicus subsp. tatora (totora) is an endemic plant from wetlands in South America's Altiplano region. In the endorheic Titicaca-Desaguadero-Poopó-Salar de Coipasa system (TDPS), totora can be found along rivers, lakes, and shallow ponds. Lake Uru-Uru is a minor lake placed upstream of Lake Poopó, and it gets water inflows from t...

IUFRO World Series Volume 38

As outlined in Chapter 2, our analysis of forest-water relations addresses four important subsystems of a linked planetary social-ecological system: climate, forests, water and people. In this chapter, we consider how each of these subsystems is changing (trend) and what is causing the change (’determinant’). We discuss the critical determinants of...

Building on the eco-hydrological insights reviewed in Chapter 2 and the ongoing change in determinants of the forest-water relationship in Chapter 3, this chapter aims to clarify the effects that changing climate and quantity, quality and pattern of tree cover in forests have on the way water becomes available for human use and ecosystem integrity....

In this chapter, we review current scientific understanding and hypotheses at seven system delineations that build up from the level of a ‘tree’ interacting with water, to that of a social-ecological system at the scale of landscapes. A system delineation separates internal entities that in-teract dynamically from external entities that may have a...

1 Abstract Scarce and uncertain data on woody debris decomposition rates are available for calibrating forest ecosystem models, owing to the difficulty of their empirical estimations. Using field data from three experimental sites which are part of the North American Long‐Term Soil Productivity (LTSP) Study in south‐eastern British Columbia (Canada...

Urban forestry is increasingly used as a tool for climate change mitigation and for providing environmental services to inhabitants of urban areas. However, tree species used in urban forestry are usually different from the ones used in commercial forestry. As a consequence, available data on growth and yield under alternative management scenarios...

Density is an important wood mechanical property and an indicator of xylem architecture and hydraulic conductivity. It can be influenced by forest management and climate. We studied the impact of thinning and climate variables on annual stem radial growth (ring width and ring density, and their earlywood and latewood components) in two contrasting...

Soil carbon (C), a fundamental component of soil organic matter (SOM), is commonly recognized as one of the key parameters of soil quality. It has been linked to ecosystem productivity because it is a sensitive indicator for monitoring programs. It is a critical pool in the carbon cycle, and through its influence on many fundamental biological and...

To facilitate the reintroduction of five native late-successional Taiwanese Fagaceae species into Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica (D.) Don) plantations, we experimented with methods to alleviate their establishment limitations. We tested different combinations of tree species, seedling development stages, and site preparation techniques. First...

La gestión de bosques mixtos se ha convertido en una estrategia de adaptación para reducir los riesgos relacionados con el cambio climático. A su vez, los modelos ecológicos pueden ser una herramienta útil para el estudio del crecimiento y la productividad de dichas masas. En este trabajo se presenta una evaluación de la capacidad del modelo híbrid...

1. Mixed conifer-hardwood forests can be more productive than pure forests and they are increasingly considered as ecosystems that could provide adaptation strategies in the face of global change. However, the combined effects of tree-to-tree competition, rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate on such mixtures remain poorly characterized...

Human activities are causing high chronic atmospheric N deposition levels that may be disrupting N cycling in forests in the western Pyrenees. To test such hypothesis, we researched the effects of atmospheric N deposition on N cycling at two Scots pine / European beech mixed forests in Navarre. One forest is placed at 1350 m.a.s.l. and has a contin...

A major problem in modern dendrochronology is that the methods traditionally used for linking tree-ring growth data to climate records are not well suited to reconstructing low-frequency climatic variations. In this study, we explored the alternative ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) to detrend tree-ring records and extract climate signa...

We examined two measures of shade tolerance (survival and growth) of planted 1-year-old seedlings of western redcedar (Thuja plicata (Donn ex D. Don)), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla ([Raf.] Sarg.)) and amabilis fir (Abies amabilis ([Dougl. ex Loud] Dougl. ex Forbes)). Seedlings were planted at two different sites (forest interior: 4.5% mean a...

Forest management has the capacity to alter the forest microclimate, affecting irradiation, water and nutrient availability. Such effects are highly dependent of the linkages among different ecological factors, which in turn depend on the biogeoclimatic characteristics of forest soils. Climate change will likely affect water availability in many fo...

Full text downloadable at: https://academica-e.unavarra.es/bitstream/handle/2454/27531/Blanco%20et%20al%202017%20postprint.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Management of mixedwoods is advocated as an effective adaptation strategy to increase ecosystem resiliency in the context of climate change. While mixedwoods have been shown to have greater resource use efficiency relative to pure stands, considerable uncertainty remains with respect to the underlying ecological processes. We explored species inter...

Download all the chapters for the book here: http://www.intechopen.com/books/tropical-forests-the-challenges-of-maintaining-ecosystem-services-while-managing-the-landscape

Management of mixedwoods is advocated as an effective adaptation strategy to increase ecosystem resiliency in the context of climate change. While mixedwoods have been shown to have greater resource use efficiency relative to pure stands, considerable uncertainty remains with respect to the underlying ecological processes. We explored species inter...

Nitrogen is traditionally assumed the main limiting factor of productivity in European temperate forests. However, anthropogenic activities have caused chronic high N deposition levels that may disrupt N cycling, although their impacts depend on these forests´ reliance on alternative N sources. To test such hypothesis, we designed a multidisciplina...