Abstract
Climate change is expected to cause major changes in forest ecosystems during the 21st century and beyond. To assess forest impacts from climate change, the existing empirical information must be structured, harmonised and assimilated into a form suitable to develop and test state-of-the-art forest and ecosystem models. The combination of empirical data collected at large spatial and long temporal scales with suitable modelling approaches is key to understand forest dynamics under climate change. To facilitate data and model integration, we identified major climate change impacts observed on European forest functioning and summarised the data available for monitoring and predicting such impacts. Our analysis of c. 120 forest-related databases (including information from remote sensing, vegetation inventories, dendroecology, palaeoecology, eddy-flux sites, common garden experiments and genetic techniques) and 50 databases of environmental drivers highlights a substantial degree of data availability and accessibility. However, some critical variables relevant to predicting European forest responses to climate change are only available at relatively short time frames (up to 10-20 years), including intra-specific trait variability, defoliation patterns, tree mortality and recruitment. Moreover, we identified data gaps or lack of data integration particularly in variables related to local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity, dispersal capabilities and physiological responses. Overall, we conclude that forest data availability across Europe is improving, but further efforts are needed to integrate, harmonise and interpret this data (i.e. making data useable for non-experts). Continuation of existing monitoring and networks schemes together with the establishments of new networks to address data gaps is crucial to rigorously predict climate change impacts on European forests.
Highlights
Changes in mean and extreme climatic conditions are affecting forest functioning worldwide (Frank et al, 2015, EEA, 2017, Seidl et al, 2017)
Ecological Modelling 416 (2020) 108870 we identified major climate change impacts observed on European forest functioning and summarised the data available for monitoring and predicting such impacts
Understanding and predicting these impacts is necessary for science-based decisions, but challenging because climate change interacts with other drivers of global change, such as rising atmospheric CO2 (Cramer et al, 2001), atmospheric deposition, land use change (Linares et al, 2009, García-Valdés et al, 2015), pests and invasive species (Krumm & Vitková, 2016, Liu et al, 2017), and management and legacy effects (Baudena et al, 2015, Motta et al, 2015, Morales-Molino et al, 2017a, Ruiz-Benito et al, 2017b)
Summary
Changes in mean and extreme climatic conditions are affecting forest functioning worldwide (Frank et al, 2015, EEA, 2017, Seidl et al, 2017) Understanding and predicting these impacts is necessary for science-based decisions, but challenging because climate change interacts with other drivers of global change, such as rising atmospheric CO2 (Cramer et al, 2001), atmospheric deposition (de Vries et al, 2014), land use change (Linares et al, 2009, García-Valdés et al, 2015), pests and invasive species (Krumm & Vitková, 2016, Liu et al, 2017), and management and legacy effects (Baudena et al, 2015, Motta et al, 2015, Morales-Molino et al, 2017a, Ruiz-Benito et al, 2017b). The use of empirical data at large spatial and/or long temporal extents in combination with suitable models is one of the most powerful tools for better understanding forest function, predicting vulnerability to climate change and assessing options for mitigation and adaptation (see e.g. Mouquet et al, 2015).
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