Are Scots pine forest edges particularly prone to drought-induced mortality?
By Allan Buras, C. Schunk, Claudia Zeiträg, Corinna Herrmann, L. Kaiser, H. Lemme, Christoph Straub, S. Taeger, Sebastian Gößwein, Hans-Joachim Klemmt and 1 more. 2018
141 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Climate change is expected to exacerbate the frequency of drought-induced tree mortality world-wide. To better predict the associated change of species composition and forest dynamics on various scales and develop adequate adaptation strategies, more information on the mechanisms driving the often observed patchiness of tree die-back is needed. Although forest-edge effects may play an important role within the given context, only few corresponding studies exist. Here, we investigate the regional die-back of Scots pine in Franconia, Germany, after a hot and dry summer in 2015, thereby emphasizing possible differences in mortality between forest edge and interior. By means of dendroecological investigations and close-range remote sensing, we assess long-term growth performance and current tree vitality along five different forest-edge distance gradients. Our results clearly indicate a differing growth performance between edge and interior trees, associated with a higher vulnerability to drought, increased mortality rates, and lower tree vitality at the forest edge. Prior long-lasting growth decline of dead trees compared to live trees suggests depletion of carbon reserves in course of a long-term drought persisting since the 1990s to be the cause of regional Scots pine die-back. These findings highlight the forest edge as a potential focal point of forest management adaptation strategies in the context of drought-induced mortality.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba2d45a27d5bad07c5bdd6e508e5d4b1c5b2c813
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In Atmospheric Science
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantifying impacts of the 2018 drought on European ecosystems in comparison to 2003 (2019, methodology): “From this event, we also learned that particularly forest edges – which feature an intermediate microclimate between the forest interior and open fields – are more susceptible to drought-induced mortality (Buras et al., 2018).”