Persons involved:
Alexander Knohl (PI)
Simon Drollinger (Postdoc)
Anne Klosterhalfen (Postdoc, associated)
Christian Markwitz (Postdoc, associated)
Mattia Bonazza (Postdoc, associated)
Marek Peksa (Technician, associated)
Research outline:
The climatic extremes in 2003, 2018, 2019, and 2022 had profound influence on water vapour carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor (H2O) exchange between forest ecosystems and the atmosphere with decreasing carbon sequestration in major parts of Central European forests (Bastos et al. 2020). Further, energy exchange was impacted and ecosystems heated up due to increased radiative energy input and reduced evaporative cooling during droughts (Graf et al. 2020). Forests are increasingly impacted by climatic extremes, weakening their role in mitigating climate change. Enhancing forest resilience is crucial, but it remains unclear how to quantify resilience based on measurements at stand level. While theoretical resilience indicators exist (Ingrisch & Bahn 2018), recent climate extremes, combined with long-term CO2 and H2O flux measurements using the eddy covariance technique, provide a yet underexplored opportunity to develop and scrutinize indicators for forest resilience to climate extremes.
In this subproject, we investigate and quantify the response, resistance, and resilience of CO2 and H2O fluxes to weather anomalies and drought events at the FoResLab sites. Our objectives are (O1) to quantify the impact of climate extremes on the CO2 and H2O exchange on managed and unmanaged forests, (O2) to develop and test CO2 and H2O flux-based indicators for forest resilience to climate extremes at our experimental sites and (O3) to combine the flux-based indicators with indicators derived by the other subprojects to develop multi-dimensional resilience indicators for testing the hypothesis (H1) that forest resilience to climate extremes increases with diversity in forest structure.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Alexander Knohl
Bioclimatology, University of Göttingen
Büsgenweg 2, 37077 Göttingen
Tel.: +49 551 39 23682
Email: aknohl@uni-goettingen.de