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Introduction
Publications
Publications (60)
Development of primary spruce forests is driven by a series of disturbances, which also have an important influence on the understorey vegetation and its diversity. Early post-disturbance processes have been intensively studied, however, very little is known about the long-term effects of disturbances on the understorey. We quantified disturbance h...
Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages at multiple spatial scales in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss and for improving current forest management policies aimed at mitigating climate change and enhancing forest resilience. Deadwood-inhabiting fungi represent an essential...
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....
The impact of forest management on biodiversity is difficult to scrutinize along gradients of management. A step towards analyzing the impact of forest management on biodiversity is comparisons between managed and primary forests. The standardized typology of tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) is a multi-taxon indicator used to quantify forest biod...
Forests are critical for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation: reducing emissions, increasing removals, and providing resilient ecosystems with stable long‐term carbon storage. However, evaluating the mitigation effectiveness of forests managed for conservation versus commodity production has been long debated. We assessed factor...
Heatwaves exert disproportionately strong and sometimes irreversible impacts on forest ecosystems. These impacts remain poorly understood at the tree and species level and across large spatial scales. Here, we investigate the effects of the record-breaking 2018 European heatwave on tree growth and tree water status using a collection of high-tempor...
Natural disturbances strongly influence forest structural dynamics, and subsequently stand structural heterogeneity, biomass, and forest functioning. The impact of disturbance legacies on current forest structure can greatly influence how we interpret drivers of forest dynamics. However, without clear insight into forest history, many studies defau...
Forests host most terrestrial biodiversity and their sustainable management is crucial to halt biodiversity loss. Although scientific evidence indicates that sustainable forest management (SFM) should be assessed by monitoring multi-taxon biodiversity, most current SFM criteria and indicators account only for trees or consider indirect biodiversity...
With accelerating environmental change, understanding forest disturbance impacts on trade-offs between biodiversity and carbon dynamics is of high socioeconomic importance. Most studies, however, have assessed immediate or short-term effects of disturbance, while long-term impacts remain poorly understood. Using a tree-ring-based approach, we analy...
Aim
Natural disturbances influence forest structure, successional dynamics, and, consequently, the distribution of species through time and space. We quantified the long-term impacts of natural disturbances on lichen species richness and composition in primary mountain forests, with a particular focus on the occurrence of endangered species.
Locat...
Primary forests, defined here as forests where the signs of human impacts, if any, are strongly blurred due to decades without forest management, are scarce in Europe and continue to disappear. Despite these losses, we know little about where these forests occur. Here, we present a comprehensive geodatabase and map of Europe’s known primary forests...
Aims
We examined differences in lifespan among the dominant tree species (spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.), fir (Abies alba Mill.), beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), and maple (Acer pseudoplatanus L.)) across primary mountain forests of Europe. We ask how disturbance history, lifetime growth patterns, and environmental factors influence lifespan.
Loc...
Wind is the leading disturbance agent in European forests, and the magnitude of wind impacts on forest mortality has increased over recent decades. However, the atmospheric triggers behind severe winds in Western Europe (large‐scale cyclones) differ from those in Southeastern Europe (small‐scale convective instability). This geographic difference i...
Adapting for competitiveness versus climatic stress tolerance constitutes a primary trade-off differentiating tree life-history strategies. This tradeoff likely influences where species’ range-limits occur, but such links are data-demanding to study and key mechanisms lack empirical support. Using an exceptionally rich dendroecological network, we...
The expected future intensification of forest disturbance as a consequence of ongoing anthropogenic climate change highlights the urgent need to more robustly quantify associated biotic responses. Saproxylic beetles are a diverse group of forest invertebrates representing a major component of biodiversity that is associated with the decomposition a...
Research Highlights: Past disturbances occurred naturally in primary forests in the Southern Carpathians. High-and moderate-severity disturbances shaped the present structure of these ecosystems, which regenerated successfully without forestry interventions. Background and Objectives: Windstorms and bark beetle outbreaks have recently affected larg...
Primary forests are critical for forest biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services. In Europe, these forests are particularly scarce and it is unclear whether they are sufficiently protected. Here we aim to: (a) understand whether extant primary forests are representative of the range of naturally occurring forest types, (b) identify forest ty...
Natural disturbances are key factors in the formation of forest ecosystem structure. Evaluation of the spatial and temporal extent of disturbance regimes is critical for understanding forest dynamics, forest structural hetero-geneity, and biodiversity habitats. Quantifying disturbance regimes is therefore imperative for appropriate management of fo...
Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss in forest ecosystems. However, studies of forest biodiversity responses to disturbance typically analyze immediate or short-term impacts only, while studies relating long-term disturbance history t...
Estimates of historical disturbance patterns are essential to guide forest management aimed at ensuring the sustainability of ecosystem functions and biodiversity. However, quantitative estimates of various disturbance characteristics required in management applications are rare in longer‐term historical studies. Thus, our objectives were to: (1) q...
A major concern in conservation biology today is the loss of genetic diversity in structured populations, which is often a consequence of habitat contraction and restricted gene flow over time. These dynamic biological processes require monitoring with temporal environmental and landscape genetic data. We compared the spatial genetic variation of a...
Accurate estimations of changes in the forest carbon (C) pools over time are essential for predicting the future forest C balance and its part in the global C cycle. While the overall understanding of global forest C dynamics has improved, some significant forest ecosystem processes have been largely overlooked, resulting in possible biases. As an...
Mortality, driven by both climate and disturbance legacies, is a key process shaping forest dynamics. Understanding the mortality patterns in primary forests in the absence of severe disturbances provides information on background natural dynamics of a given forest type under ongoing climate change. This can then be compared to mortality rates in s...
Key message
Winter drought becomes a limiting factor of forest stand growth by the end of the twentieth century.
Abstract
Disturbances strongly influence the structure of natural forests. The frequency and severity of natural disturbances, as well as drought events, are expected to increase with climate change. Our study investigated if forests wi...
Given the global intensification of forest management and climate change, protecting and studying forests that develop free of direct human intervention-also known as primary forests-are becoming increasingly important. Yet, most countries still lack data regarding primary forest distribution. Previous studies have tested remote sensing approaches...
Climatic constraints on tree growth mediate an important link between terrestrial and atmospheric carbon pools. Tree rings provide valuable information on climate‐driven growth patterns, but existing data tend to be biased towards older trees on climatically extreme sites. Understanding climate change responses of biogeographic regions requires dat...
Aim
The tinder fungus Fomes fomentarius is a pivotal wood decomposer in European beech Fagus sylvatica forests. The fungus, however, has regionally declined due to centuries of logging. To unravel biogeographical drivers of arthropod communities associated with this fungus, we investigated how space, climate and habitat amount structure alpha and b...
Context
A comprehensive understanding of how rapidly changing environments affect species gene flow is critical for mitigating future biodiversity losses. While recent methodological developments in landscape ecology and genetics have greatly advanced our understanding of biodiversity conservation, they are rarely combined and applied in studies....
Disentangling the importance of developmental vs. environmental drivers of variation in forest biomass is key to predicting the future of forest carbon sequestration. At coarse scales, forest biomass is likely to vary along major climatic and physiographic gradients. Natural disturbance occurs along these broad biophysical gradients, and depending...
Amidst rapid global climate change and at a time when many adaptive policies and strategies have been implemented , reductionism in forest management decisions may have detrimental effects on forest biodiversity. Stăncioiu et al. (2018) made an important contribution by assessing forest connectivity based on tree species populations in Romania. The...
Restoring the structural characteristics of secondary old-growth forests that were previously managed is increasingly debated to help increase the area of more complex forests which provide a broader array of forest services and functions. The paucity of long-term data sets in Central Europe has limited our ability to understand the ongoing ecologi...
Accurately capturing medium- to low-frequency trends in tree-ring data is vital to assessing climatic response and developing robust reconstructions of past climate. Non-climatic disturbance can affect growth trends in tree-ring-width (RW) series and bias climate information obtained from such records. It is important to develop suitable strategies...
Tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) are important features for the conservation of biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Although other structural indicators of forest biodiversity have been extensively studied in recent decades, TreMs have often been overlooked, either due to the absence of a consensual definition or a lack of knowledge. Despite the i...
Large-scale forest dynamics are commonly assumed to be climate driven, but appropriately scaled disturbance histories are rarely available to assess how disturbance legacies alter subsequent disturbance rates and the climate sensitivity of disturbance. We compiled multiple tree ring-based disturbance histories from primary Picea abies forest fragme...
Aim
Primary forests have high conservation value but are rare in Europe due to historic land use. Yet many primary forest patches remain unmapped, and it is unclear to what extent they are effectively protected. Our aim was to (1) compile the most comprehensive European‐scale map of currently known primary forests, (2) analyse the spatial determina...
Determining the drivers of shifting forest disturbance rates remains a pressing global change issue. Large-scale forest dynamics are commonly assumed to be climate driven, but appropriately scaled disturbance histories are rarely available to assess how disturbance legacies alter subsequent disturbance rates and the climate sensitivity of disturban...
The role of density dependence in shaping spatial patterns in tree distributions presumably changes throughout stand development. However, empirical investigations into developmental processes are often limited by a lack of long-term data on disturbance history, which further limits the ability to assess the role of spatial variation in site condit...
Mixed-severity disturbance regimes are prevalent in temperate forests worldwide, but key uncertainties remain regarding the variability of disturbance-mediated structural development pathways. This study investigates the influence of disturbance history on current structure in primary, unmanaged Norway spruce (Picea abies) forests throughout the Ca...
European natural mountain Norway spruce (Picea abies) forests are currently subject to extensive disturbances. An improved understanding of the self-regulated regenerative capacity of this forest type is therefore needed. We used the last remnant of natural mountain Norway spruce forests in central northwestern Europe (BNF Brocken natural forest),...
How do canopy-understory interactions respond to variation in disturbance severity over extended periods of time? For forests with different disturbance histories, do light availability and understory-cohort densities converge towards a common old-growth structure, or do historical legacies influence populations indefinitely?.
Primary forests are characterized by high vertical and horizontal stand diversity, which provides habitat for a diverse range of species with complex habitat requirements. Detailed knowledge of related ecological processes and habitat development of primary forest species are essential to inform forest management and biodiversity conservation decis...
Habitat loss and fragmentation can negatively impact the persistence of dispersal-limited lichen species with narrow niches. Rapid change in microclimate due to canopy dieback exposes species to additional stressors that may limit their capacity to survive and colonize. We studied the importance of old trees as micro-refuges and microclimate stabil...
ContextDistribution and connectivity of suitable habitat for species of conservation concern is critical for effective conservation planning. Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), an umbrella species for biodiversity conservation, is increasingly threatened because of habitat loss and fragmentation. Objective
We assessed the impact of drastic changes in...
In order to gauge ongoing and future changes to disturbance regimes, it is necessary to establish a solid baseline of historic disturbance patterns against which to evaluate these changes. Further, understanding how forest structure and composition respond to variation in past disturbances may provide insight into future resilience to climate-drive...
Population structure and barriers to gene flow are important components for understanding the evolutionary history of a species. Here we study population structure and differentiation in the western capercaillie (Aves: Phasianidae) along the Carpathian Mountains. Further, we compared the levels of population differentiation among capercaillie from...
Types and proportions of natural canopy accession strategies of Norway spruce reflect local changes in historical forest structure and dynamics. Through the detection of growth strategies, it is possible to identify historical events such as disturbances; the main drivers affecting primeval forests dynamics. Moreover, the effect of local thermal co...
The area of the Nízke Tatry and Veľká Fatra Mts. is considered a core population habitat of
the Western Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) in the Western Carpathians. Considerable interventions
occurred in this habitat after the windstorm in 2004. We provide complex information
about the quality and size of the suitable habitat – representing key data...
Questions: How have the historical frequency and severity of natural disturbances
in primary Picea abies forests varied at the forest stand and landscape level
during recent centuries? Is there a relationship between physiographic attributes
and historical patterns of disturbance severity in this system?
Location: Primary P. abies forests of the Ea...
Projects
Projects (2)
The REMOTE (REsearch of MOuntain TEmperate) Primary Forests project (www.remoteforests.org) is a long-term international collaboration based on a network of permanent sample plots in the forests of central, eastern, and southeastern Europe. Since 2010, our international team has developed a system for monitoring select remaining primary forests in the region. These primary forests play a key role in providing habitat for many rare species and other important ecosystem functions. From our network of systematic permanent inventory plots we collect extensive data on forest structure and long-term dynamics of individual trees. Dendroecological analyses, that is analyses of past tree growth based on tree rings from individual trees across tree, stand, and landscape levels, are a key part of our work. We have built one of the largest dendroecological databases in the world including thousands of individual trees. Our overall goal is to contribute to the long-term scientific understanding of those unique remaining primary forests. At the same time, we hope to contribute to the protection of those remaining primary forests because they are threatened from many sides.
