Rüdiger Grote

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• Dr. habil.
• Senior Researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

The paper presents the concept of a new model system, which allows scaling of ecosystem processes from the plot to the region (LandscapeDNDC). The framework incorporates different vegetation types and management systems for simulating biosphere/ hydrosphere processes of forest, arable and grassland ecosystems. The design concept divides ecosystems...

In an increasingly urbanized world, air pollution mitigation is considered one of most important issues in city planning. Urban trees help to improve air quality by facilitating widespread deposition of various gases and particles through the provision of large surface areas as well as through their influence on microclimate and air turbulence. How...

The emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) is usually thought to depend on species-specific emission capacities that vary with seasonal and phenological conditions. Actual-so called constitutive-emissions are then calculated from prevailing temperature and radiation. However, various abiotic and biotic stressors such as ozone, extr...

Plant responses to drought and heat stress have been extensively studied, whereas post-stress recovery, which is fundamental to understanding stress resilience, has received much less attention. Here, we present a conceptual stress-recovery framework with respect to hydraulic and metabolic functioning in woody plants. We further synthesize results...

Extremely high temperatures, which negatively affect the human health and plant performances, are becoming more frequent in cities. Urban green infrastructure, particularly trees, can mitigate this issue through cooling due to transpiration, and shading. Temperature regulation by trees depends on feedbacks among the climate, water supply, and plant...

ECOSENSE is a Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG to develop and test novel environmental sensing techniques and apply them to enhance our understanding and modelling of water and carbon fluxes in forest ecosystems. Specifically, with a distributed sampling approach, ECOSENSE studies the impact of forest...

Sugarcane (Saccharum spp. hybrid) is a key crop for bioenergy production due to its high productivity in tropical and subtropical climates. Despite this economic importance, there is currently no information available on the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during the growth phase of this crop. This is despite the fact that the sustain...

Tree growth and forest development depend to a large degree on climatic conditions. This is mostly because they are determining primary production, respiration losses, water demand and availability. The complex nature interacting climate components, however, represents a challenge if carbon sequestration and forest growth should be evaluated under...

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of urban heat islands and stormwater flooding. In order to mitigate these threats cities are turning toward green infrastructure to restore the hydrologic cycle in a way that increases the ecosystem services provided by trees. Strategically designed green infrastructure can mitigate runoff vo...

The severity of droughts is expected to increase with climate change, leading to more frequent tree mortality and a decline in forest ecosystem services. Consequently, there is an urgent need for monitoring networks to provide early warnings of drought impacts on forests. Dendrometers capturing stem diameter variations may offer a simple and relati...

Global climate change threatens ecosystem functioning worldwide. Forest ecosystems are particularly important for carbon sequestration, thereby buffering climate change and providing socio-economic services. However, recurrent stresses, such as heat waves, droughts and floods can affect forests with potential cascading effects on their carbon sink...

Drought stress causes multiple feedback responses in plants. These responses span from stomata closure and enzymatic downregulation of photosynthetic activity to structural adjustments of xylem biomass and leaf area. Some of these processes are not easily reversible and may persist long after the stress has ended. Despite a multitude of hydraulic m...

Heat and drought stress events have a significant impact on plant phenology. Changes in phenology can alter the length of the growing season and affect carbon, water, and energy fluxes. Some of these changes can persist for several years, especially in response to successive stress events. In this work, we combine remote sensing data and process-ba...

When trees within forests increase their dimension, the limitation of space (and thus resources) can cause competition-based mortality. Thus, growth and mortality interact, and acceleration of growth triggered by climatic change or forest management may be accompanied by increased mortality. We here concentrate on evaluating the underlying causes o...

nteraction of land-use change and climate change scenarios can lead to complex changes of carbon and water cycle dynamics of grassland-forest landscapes. This study uses the process-based model LandscapeDNDC to simulate carbon and water cycle dynamics of grasslands, broadleaved, coniferous and mixed forests for a landscape of southwest Germany. The...

- Drought stress is imposing multiple feedback responses in plants. These responses span from stomata closure and enzymatic downregulation of photosynthetic activity to structural adjustments in leaf area. Some of these processes are not easily reversible and may persist long after the stress ended. Unfortunately, simulation models widely lack an i...

The inclusion of tree hydraulic processes into ecosystem models provides opportunities to better capture instantaneous tree drought responses as well as drought legacy effects. Here we are presenting a simple tree hydrologic approach implemented into a process-oriented ecosystem model that simulates instantaneous tree water potential dynamics based...

European beech is one of the most common tree species in Europe and is generally suggested to play even more of a prominent role in forestry in the future. It seems to have the potential to partially replace Norway spruce, as it is less sensitive to expected warmer and drier conditions. It is, however, not well known in which regions these new plan...

Forest models are instrumental for understanding and projecting the impact of climate change on forests. A considerable number of forest models have been developed in the last decades. However, few systematic and comprehensive model comparisons have been performed in Europe that combine an evaluation of modelled carbon and water fluxes and forest s...

Antecedents: Drought limits tree C uptake and growth, ultimately leading to tree death by hydraulic failure & C starvation. Legacy effects of drought on tree physiology are well known (Ruehr et al., 2019), but they are often overlooked in forest simulation models. We developed a hydraulic + legacy module for the LandscapeDNDC model (Haas et al., 20...

The Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) provides a framework for the collation of a set of consistent, multi-sector, multi-scale climate-impact simulations, based on scientifically and politically relevant historical and future scenarios. This framework serves as a basis for robust projections of climate impacts, as well as...

How drought affects tree and stand growth is an old question, but is getting unprecedented relevance in view of climate change. Stress effects related to drought have been mostly studied at the individual tree level, mostly investigating dominant trees and using their responses as indicator for the impact at the stand level. However, findings at tr...

The growing population in cities is causing a deterioration of air quality due to the emission of pollutants, causing serious health impacts. Trees and urban forests can contribute through the interception and removal of air pollutants such as particulate matter (PM). The dry deposition of PM by vegetation depends on air pollutant concentration, me...

L’aumento della popolazione nelle città a livello mondiale sta provocando un progressivo peggioramento della qualità dell’aria, a causa dell’emissione di inquinanti derivanti da attività antropiche. Gli effetti sono il superamento dei limiti imposti a livello europeo e l’esposizione dei cittadini ad alte concentrazioni nell’aria, provocando gravi c...

Air chemistry is affected by the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), which originate from almost all plants in varying qualities and quantities. They also vary widely among different crops, an aspect that has been largely neglected in emission inventories. In particular, bioenergyrelated species can emit mixtures of highly reac...

Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) play important roles in plant stress responses and can serve as stress indicators. While the impacts of gradual environmental changes on BVOCs have been studied extensively, insights in emission responses to repeated stress and recovery are widely absent. Therefore, we studied the dynamics of shoot gas exc...

We applied the process-based model, LandscapeDNDC, to estimate feed availability in the Sahelian and Sudanian agro-ecological zones of West Africa as a basis for calculating the regional Livestock Carrying Capacity (LCC). Comparison of the energy supply (S) from feed resources, including natural pasture, browse, and crop residues, with energy deman...

Process-based biogeochemical models are valuable tools to evaluate impacts of environmental or management changes on the greenhouse gas (GHG) balance of forest ecosystems. We evaluated LandscapeDNDC, a process-based model developed to simulate carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and water cycling at ecosystem and regional scales, against eddy covariance and s...

Societal Impact Statement Pollen relates to many aspects of human and environmental health, which protection and improvement are endorsed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. By highlighting these connections in the frame of current challenges in monitoring and research, we discuss the need of more integrative and multidisciplinary...

During drought, trees reduce water loss and hydraulic failure by closing their stomata, which also limits photosynthesis. Under severe drought stress, other acclimation mechanisms are trigged to further reduce transpiration to prevent irreversible conductance loss. Here, we investigate two of them: the reversible impacts on the photosynthetic appar...

Background/Question/Methods There is no more vital connection than the tight linkage between water and organic carbon, and there is no more paradigmatic example for that than plant photosynthesis. In plants, carbon uptake is done at elevated expenses in terms of water transport from soil to the atmosphere. Under limited water supply, transpiration...

West African Sahelian and Sudanian ecosystems provide essential services to people and also play a significant role within the global carbon cycle. However, climate and land use are dynamically changing, and uncertainty remains with respect to how these changes will affect the potential of these regions to provide food and fodder resources or how t...

Climate change will impact forest productivity worldwide. Forecasting the magnitude of such impact, with multiple environmental stressors changing simultaneously, is only possible with the help of process‐based models. In order to assess their performance, such models require careful evaluation against measurements. However, direct comparison of mo...

Trees and urban forests remove particulate matter (PM) from the air through the deposition of particles on the leaf surface, thus helping to improve air quality and reduce respiratory problems in urban areas. Leaf deposited PM, in turn, is either resuspended back into the atmosphere, washed off during rain events or transported to the ground with l...

West African Sahelian and Sudanian ecosystems are providing essential services to people and also play a significant role within the global carbon cycle. However, climate and land use are dynamically changing and it remains uncertain how these changes will affect the potential of these regions for providing food and fodder resources or the biospher...

Climate change in combination with increasing urbanization is a major challenge for our cities. Ecosystem services from the urban green play a significant role in mitigating the negative effects. Urban tree growth models are appropriate tools for the quantification of ecosystem services in some cases in dependence of the plant growth dynamics and o...

The process-based model 4C (FORESEE) has been developed over the past 20 years to study climate impacts on forests and is now freely available as an open-source tool. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive description of this 4C version (v2.2) for scientific users of the model and to present an evaluation of 4C at four different...

Nitrogen oxides (NOx), mainly a mixture of nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), are formed by the reaction of nitrogen and oxygen compounds in the air as a result of combustion processes and traffic. Both deposit into leaves via stomata, which on the one hand benefits air quality and on the other hand provides an additional source of nitro...

The anticipated climate change during the next decades is posing crucial challenges to ecosystems. In order to decrease the vulnerability of forests, introducing tree species’ mixtures are a viable strategy, with deep-rooting native Silver fir (Abies alba) being a primary candidate for admixture into current pure stands of European beech (Fagus syl...

With increasing realization that particles in the air are a major health risk in urban areas, strengthening particle deposition is discussed as a means to air-pollution mitigation. Particles are deposited physically on leaves and thus the process depends on leaf area and surface properties, which change throughout the year. Current state-of-the-art...

Rising temperatures and changes in snow cover, as can be expected under a warmer global climate, may have large impacts on mountain grassland productivity limited by cold and long winters. Here, we combined two existing models, the multi-layer atmosphere-SOiL-VEGetation model (SOLVEG) and the BASic GRAssland model (BASGRA), which accounts for snow,...

Process-based models are increasingly applied for simulating long-term forest developments in order to capture climate change impacts and to investigate suitable management responses. Regarding dimensional development, however, allometric relations such as the height/diameter ratio, branch and coarse root fractions or the dependency of crown dimens...

ContextThe contribution of forest understory to the temperate forest carbon sink is not well known, increasing the uncertainty in C cycling feedbacks on global climate as estimated by Earth System Models.Objectives We aimed at quantifying the effect of woody and non-woody understory vegetation on net ecosystem production (NEP) for a forested area o...

Carbon allocation plays a key role in ecosystem dynamics and plant adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Hence, proper description of this process in vegetation models is crucial for the simulations of the impact of climate change on carbon cycling in forests. Here we review how carbon allocation modelling is currently implemented in 31...

Research Highlights: Investigations of evapotranspiration in a mature mixed beech-fir forest stand do not indicate higher resilience towards intensified drying-wetting cycles as compared with pure beech stands. Background and Objectives: Forest management seeks to implement adaptive measures, for example, the introduction of more drought resistant...

REVIEW Tropospheric ozone (O3) is one of the most prominent air pollution problems in Europe and other countries worldwide. Human health is affected by O3 via the respiratory as well the cardiovascular systems. Even though trees are present in relatively low numbers in urban areas, they can be a dominant factor in the regulation urban O3 concentrat...

Two phenomena that can cause large numbers of premature human deaths have gained attention in the last years: Heat waves and air pollution. These two effects have two things in common: They are closely related to climate change and they are particularly intense in urban areas. Urban areas are particular susceptible to these impacts because they can...

Extremely high temperatures are getting more frequent in cities and their potential impacts on human health and plant performance are increasingly worrying. Implementing urban green infrastructure, particularly trees, can mitigate this development due to cooling from evapotranspiration and shading. However, the effect is not linearly scaling with t...

Volatile organic hydrocarbons, which are released to the atmosphere by plants (biogenic VOC, BVOC), have large influence on atmospheric chemistry and thus air quality. They are beside nitrogen oxides and anthropogenic VOC eminent precursors for tropospheric ozone and may also foster the creation of aerosols. This literature review summarizes the cu...

Climate extremes are likely to occur more frequently in the future, including a combination of heat waves and drought. However, the responses of trees to combined stress and their post-stress recovery are not fully understood yet. Therefore, this study investigated the responses of semi-arid Pinus halepensis seedlings to moderate drought, heat and...

Core Ideas Pre‐alpine areas face more intense warming and extreme hydrological events than the global average. Climate and land management change have far‐reaching impacts on ecosystem functions and services. We have improved knowledge of water, energy, and matter exchange by long‐term observations and modeling. Global change has triggered several...

Supporting Information S1

Quantifying ecosystem services is one of the most important issues in decision support for planning and managing urban green spaces, and mitigation of climate change and air pollution impacts are among the most prominent of such ecosystem services. However, pollution removal, carbon sequestration and cooling effect of trees in the city are difficul...

Forest carbon use efficiency (CUE, the ratio of net to gross primary productivity) represents the fraction of photosynthesis that is not used for plant respiration. Although important, it is often neglected in climate change impact analyses. Here, we assess the potential impact of thinning on projected carbon-cycle dynamics and implications for for...

Energy crops are an important renewable source for energy production in future. To ensure high yields of crops, N fertilization is a common practice. However, knowledge on environmental impacts of bioenergy plantations, particularly in systems involving trees, and the effects of N fertilization is scarce. We studied the emission of volatile organic...

Parks provide important ecosystem services for the city environment and people as for example the improvement of air quality or opportunity for recreation. Environmental benefits are strongly related to the species physiological properties, which however depend on the individual dimension and competition situation of a plant, in particular for a tr...

[Urban trees and parks provide many desirable services. They are a natural protection agains noise, improve habitat conditios for animals, protect against stormwater damage, mitigated climate warming effects and remove air pollutants. Therefore, 'urban greening' and 'million-tree-programs' are favorits in urban planning. However, there are some neg...

Introduction: Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) emitted from vegetation have significant effects on the biosphere (Peñuelas and Staudt, 2010), mediating biotic interactions, and on the atmosphere, influencing its warming potential, the formation of particulates and the concentration of tropospheric ozone. As the amount and composition of...

Ecosystem modeling can help decision making regarding planting of urban trees for climate change mitigation and air pollution reduction. Algorithms and models that link the properties of plant functional types, species groups, or single species to their impact on specific ecosystem services have been developed. However, these models require a consi...

Tropospheric ozone and particulate matter affect human health and cause vegetation stress, dysfunction and damages. In this study we investigate the effect of increasing urban vegetation i.e. tree species on atmospheric chemistry, a potential urban management strategy to counteract high levels of local pollutants such as ozone, OH and PM10 caused b...

Urban forests play an important role in mitigating the effects of climate change and atmospheric pollution in the city. This action strongly depends on the species and the climate. In this context, the Mediterranean region is peculiar both in terms of biodiversity and climate, and it is often characterized by a long period of summer drought. The mo...

For avoiding competition with food production, marginal land is economically and environmentally highly attractive for biomass production with short-rotation coppices (SRC) of fast-growing tree species such as poplars. Herein, we evaluated the environmental impacts of technological, agronomic and environmental aspects of bioenergy production from h...

The potential of emissions from urban vegetation combined with anthropogenic emissions to produce ozone and particulate matter has long been recognized. This potential increases with rising temperatures and may lead to severe problems with air quality in densely populated areas during heat waves. Here, we investigate how heat waves affect emissions...

Bioenergy crop production is rapidly expanding in Europe and the potential emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) might change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, influencing in turn air quality and regional climate. The environmental impacts of bioenergy crops on air chemistry are difficult to assess due to a lack of accu...

Global incoming shortwave radiation (Rg) is the energy source for the majority of biogeochemical processes on Earth, as well as for photo-voltaic power production. Existing simple site-specific models to estimate Rg commonly use the daily range of air temperature as input variable. Here, we present a simple model for incoming short-wave radiation,...

More than half of the world’s population currently lives in the cities and consequently urbanization has been among the major drivers of global environmental change. The fast urban growth, likely to result in a share of 75% of people living in cities by 2050, has resulted in development of cities which are unfriendly to people as well as to the env...

Urban development is triggered by the demand for climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as for air pollution reduction strategies. Green infrastructure has been identified as a means to achieving this goal, often with synergistic impacts and high economic efficiency. Algorithms and models have been developed that link the properties of pl...

Understanding the multiple processes involved in the interactions between urban trees and their surrounding environment is of the utmost importance to determine the relationship between them and to assess what might happen under altered conditions such as those imposed by climate change or by increasing concentrations of air pollutants. In order to...

Soils are a significant source for the secondary greenhouse gas NO and assumed to be a significant source of tropospheric NOx in rural areas. Here we tested the LandscapeDNDC model for its capability to simulate magnitudes and dynamics of soil NO emissions for 22 sites differing in land use (arable, grassland and forest) and edaphic as well as clim...

Hybrid poplar short-rotation coppices (SRC) provide feedstocks for bioenergy production and can be established on lands that are suboptimal for food production. The environmental consequences of deploying this production system on marginal agricultural land need to be evaluated, including the investigation of common management practices i.e., ferti...

Key message A higher mortality of dominant trees under drought stress is explained by impacts of tree size, canopy- and root structure and the hydraulic transport system. Abstract Drought stress can trigger tree mortality but the impact depends on stress intensity (water demand and availability) and on the vulnerability of the individual. Therefor...

Poster shows preliminary results from ISIMIP experiments 1a-2a for Sorø with 3D-CMCC-FEM

By avoiding competition with classical agricultural production marginal land is economically and environmentally highly attractive for biomass production with short-rotations coppices (SRC) of fast-growing tree species such as poplars. The quantification of carbon sequestration and the comparable evaluation of potential environmental impacts are b...

Drought- and heat-driven tree mortality, along with associated insect outbreaks, have been observed globally in recent decades and are expected to increase in future climates. Despite its potential to profoundly alter ecosystem carbon and water cycles, how tree mortality scales up to ecosystem functions and fluxes is uncertain. We describe a framew...

Bioenergy feedstock and pulpwood for paper production can be supplied by short-rotation coppices (SRC). Compared to non-woody bioenergy crops (e.g. rapeseed or maize), biodiversity is less affected and negative environmental impacts are considered of minor importance. However, increased emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds affect air qu...

Programs to plant millions of trees in cities around the world aim at the reduction of summer temperatures, increase of carbon storage, storm water control, and recreational space, as well as at poverty alleviation. These urban greening programs, however, do not take into account how closely human and natural systems are coupled in urban areas. Com...

Trees can significantly impact the urban air chemistry by the uptake and emission of reactive biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), which are involved in ozone and particle formation. Here we present the emission potentials of "constitutive" (cBVOCs) and "stress-induced" BVOCs (sBVOCs) from the dominant broadleaf woody plant species in the m...

Urban air quality and human health are among the key aspects of future urban planning. In order to address pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter, efforts need to be made to quantify and reduce their concentrations. One important aspect in understanding urban air quality is the influence of urban vegetation which may act as both, emitter a...

High concentrations of ozone (O3) can have significant impacts on the health and productivity of agricultural and forest ecosystems, leading to significant economic losses. In order to estimate this impact under a wide range of environmental conditions, the mechanisms of O3 impacts on physiological and biochemical processes have been intensively in...

Germany, and other countries as well, intends to largely increase the plantation area for bioenergy production in the near future. Potential plant species that are likely to be intensively cultivated are corn, energy grasses, and woody crops, which might emit biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) at higher rates than common agricultural specie...