We will conduct a continental-scale climate sensitivity analysis of European beech and will investigate how different beech provenances differ in their climate growth response
Accounting for evolutionary responses based on tree-ring traits will allow reducing uncertainties in the spatial distributions of European trees species under forthcoming climate change scenarios
Species-specific reactions of temperate European forest trees to a changing environment. A project related to the Swiss Canopy Crane II (SCC II) site near Basel and the network TreeNet.
Future climate change will have drastic effects on mountain forests. We will analyse ancient DNA preserved in natural archives to reconstruct the impact of past rapid climate change on the neutral and adaptive genetic diversity of trees.
In Europe, the Ash Dieback disease caused by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus has led to high mortality rates of common ash. We analyze how radial growth and wood anatomical parameters influence the disease progression in trees.
Extreme climate events are expected to become more frequent with climate warming. We test genetic differentiation in resistance to late frost and drought in silver fir populations planted in the 1980s in Swizterland and abroad.
Our aim is to estimate Swiss forest net ecosystem productivity (NEP) at monthly or seasonal resolution for each individual year in order to link biomass changes over time with global drivers.
This project aims to integrate the recording of standardized mast observation into existing phenology networks (e.g. PhaenoNet, Phenowald, PhenoRanger) and field surveys. The recorded data will be made publicly available on the already established platform of MastWeb hosted at WSL.
"PhenoRangers" aims to establish interactions between current research on the impact of climate change on the forest and the public, using phenology as the main tool.
As part of the Blue-Green Biodiversity Research Initiative (Eawag-WSL funded by ETH), we study differences in the effect of global environmental change on the phenology of primary production in lakes and their surrounding watersheds using remote sensing techniques.
The synchronization between supply and demand of resources in temperate forests is vital to ensure the optimal and sustainable functioning of these ecosystems. This project aims to understand how global warming is disrupting interactions between above- and below-ground organisms.
In this project, we investigate causes for the impacts of the extreme summer drought 2018 on the vitality of beech trees in different regions of the Swiss Plateau and Jura.
The Long-Term Ecologiocal Research in Europe (LTER-Europe) capitalizes on research infrastructures such as the in-situ network of sites and information technology. Thousands of research projects have been carried out taking advantage of this infrastructure.
Which are the main mechanisms conveying adaptation on the organ and whole tree level, how fast does acclimation occur and how long is an acclimation potential sustained?
The project aims to track the progress of winter bud dormancy of major temperate trees by regularly tracing the amount of isotopically labelled water that can be transferred to the buds during the whole dormancy period.
To improve our assessment of ozone effects on forest ecosystems, we advocate the need (i) for further experimental and long-term monitoring studies and (ii) to develop physiological and demographic modelling tools.
