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How will the changing environment impact bark-boring insects? Climate change projections indicate more frequent extreme weather events, such as storms, heatwaves, droughts, and floods. One of the likely consequences of this will be an abundance of stressed trees with weakened defences against pests, creating favourable conditions for some species of...
Two new videos by Forest Research have been released to help build awareness of drought risk amongst landowners and land managers.
The soil conditions experienced by a growing tree are reproduced under controlled conditions. Fluid distributions with the tree are visualised using magnetic resonance imaging in order to identify stresses and determine if these are linked to drought cracking and shake.
Project addressing knowledge gaps in the drought response of a variety of UK tree species, to inform future decision-making.
This study identified 288 medium or high drought risk forest sites in eastern Scotland, 125 of which include Sitka spruce as a major component. Sitka spruce is intolerant of drought and is known to have previously experienced drought damage such as tree mortality and stem cracking in eastern Scotland. Cases...
Droughty soils in east and southern Scotland
Probabilistic drought risk analysis
Projected change in frequency of dry summers
Many studies quantify short-term drought impact on tree growth relative to pre-drought growth averages. However, fewer studies examine the extent to which droughts of differing severity differentially impact tree growth or shape stand dynamics. Focusing on three droughts in high and low density stands of Pinus sylvestris in Scotland, we...
Understanding how we can increase the resilience of forest systems to future extreme drought events is increasingly important as these events become more frequent and intense. Diversifying production forests using intimate mixtures of trees with complementary functional traits is considered as one promising silvicultural approach that may increase drought resilience....
As our climate warms, the pressures on global forest ecosystems from extreme climate events are expected to increase across much of the world (Anderegg et al., 2020; Brodribb et al., 2020). Of particular concern is the increasing threat to tree health and productivity posed by drought. Despite a predominantly cool...
Understanding the impacts of extreme drought on forest productivity requires a comprehensive assessment of tree and forest resilience. However, current approaches to quantifying resilience limit our understanding of forest response dynamics, recovery trajectories and drought legacies by constraining the temporal scale and resolution of assessment. We compared individual tree growth...
