Effects of forest structures on drought resilience of individual trees
Exceptional droughts, such as those experienced in Central Europe in 2018, are highly likely to increase by the end of the century, making silvicultural adaptation strategies necessary to maintain sustainability in managed forests.
The project intends to increase the resilience and resistance of beech-dominated forest stands to drought events by exploring relationships between forest structures, individual neighborhoods, and drought stress on individual trees. This will be achieved through an innovative combination of mobile laser scanning techniques and retrospective mass spectrometric data analysis.
The practical benefit of the project lies in the in-depth investigation of silviculturally controllable factors (forest structure, individual neighborhood) that potentially influence drought stress. This will expand the scientific basis for climate-adaptive silviculture in beech-dominated forests.
Contact:
Duration:
2020-2023
Funding:
Bavarian State Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture and Forestry through the project “Effects of forest structures on the drought resilience of individual trees (W049)”).
Publications:
Mathes T, Seidel D, Häberle K, Pretzsch H, Annighöfer P (2023). What Are We Missing? Occlusion in Laser Scanning Point Clouds and Its Impact on the Detection of Single-Tree Morphologies and Stand Structural Variables. Remote Sensing, 15(450). DOI: 10.3390/ rs15020450