Institut für Waldschutz
Central Europe has developed into a hotspot of climatic extreme events in the last decade. Unprecedented combined water and temperature anomalies such as in the years 2018, 2019 and 2022 had massive impacts on forest ecosystems resulting in large-scale mortality in Norway spruce stands as well as unseen mortality in beech stands across Central Europe. Climate projections predict that the intensity and frequency of such climate extreme events will increase in the future challenging our current forest management practices. Adapting forests to future climate not only protects important forest ecosystem functions but also secures the forests’ ability to sequester CO2, hence mitigating climate change. Maintaining essential forest ecosystem functions and services in the face of climate change, while keeping options open for adapting and transforming forests into new trajectories of forest dynamics has been coined “forest resilience”. FoResLab will address the central question how can we make forests resilient to climate changes in current and future conditions in a highly inter- and transdisciplinary approach. It will quantify (a) impacts of climate change on forest ecosystems and its functions and services in Lower Saxony and beyond, (b) develop pathways towards increasing the resilience of forests, study the role of forests as water and carbon reservoirs, (c) investigate managed (Landesforsten) and unmanaged forests (National Park), (d) develop a innovative forest monitoring system based on experimental sites and remote sensing. It finally (e) translates its findings into sustainable forest management with our practise partners and the civil society. Thus, FoResLab addresses six out of seven thematic focus areas of the call. FoResLab connects leading scientific and non-scientific actors from three universities (UGOE, LUH, TUBS), a university of applied sciences (HAWK), two state research institutions (NW-FVA, JKI), a museum (Forum Wissen of UGOE), practise partners (NLF, NP Harz, NP Hainich) and an international partner (LIST). It will capitalise on recent developments in forest research and digitalization and thus act as a forum for scientists, stakeholders, and civil society to learn, to inform, and to advise on pathways towards climate-resilient forests. Through its three complementary, yet highly interacting platforms, i.e. the Experimental Platform, the Digital Platform, and the Societal Platform, it offers the opportunity to embrace further research projects, practise partners and civil society actors in the future, thus allowing to evolve and substantially strengthening the Lower Saxony Centre for Climate Research. The Julius Kuehn-Institute for forest protection will contribute to ForResLab by establishing digital twin for the contributing forest sites. Here we will represent forest stands as a digiital representation in the forest patch model FORMIND and establish a data stream from the forest sites into the model. Crucial forest tree parameters like carbon uptake, carbon allocation, growth, regeneration and mrotality will be measured continuously and in real-time and fed into the modeling framework. The model will thus learn from tree responses to climate variability, making it more realistic and better capable of prediction forest responses to climate change and forest resilience. A model interface will be made available to allow stakeholders and users to develop, simulate and validate management options and their outcome under different climatic scenarios. As such, the Julius Kuehn-Institute for forest protection will contribute to developing strategies for strengthening forest resilience for generations to come.
Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
