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Assessing the resilience of UK forests to extreme climatic events

Home research Forestry and climate change mitigation Assessing the resilience of UK forests to extreme climatic events

The project aims to:

  • Quantify the historic impact and legacy of extreme historical climatic events, particularly drought, by using tree-ring chronologies and historic climate and soil data
  • Assess how different silvicultural management techniques can be used to mitigate against the negative impacts of extreme climatic events on tree growth

Research objectives

Building adaptive capacity into furture forest design and management can help to ensure that UK forests are resilient to the challenges of our predicted future climate. This project will quantify the impact of extreme historical climatic events on pine and spruce in UK forests, and use this information to identify forest management practices which might mitigate the negative impacts from such events in the future. 

The research aims to answer the following questions:

  • How widespread are historical drought impacts on UK forest trees and are historical impacts more severe in sites currently deemed to be high risk?
  • How long-lasting is the legacy of severe/prolonged water deficits on forest growth?
  • How do different forest management treatments (e.g. planting density) impact susceptibility of forest stands to drought?
  • What is the predicted impact of potential future water deficits?
  • How do UK forest tree ring chronologies compare with Southern European studies on drought impacts?

This project started in September 2018 and is part of a 4 year PhD.

Research publications

Forestry and climate change mitigation
In this section
Forestry and climate change mitigation
Themes
Climate change, Forest management, Measuring, modelling and forecasting, Soil science
Research Status
current
Research Groups
Climate change, Silviculture and wood properties
Contacts
Tom Ovenden
Scientist - Silviculture & Species
Forestry Staff Ovenden Tom 05.2e16d0ba.fill 600x600 1
Funding & partners
  • The Scottish Forestry Trust
  • University of Stirling

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Publications

Life after recovery: Increased resolution of forest resilience assessment sheds new light on post-drought compensatory growth and recovery dynamics

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 histories with growth forecasted using […]

Publications

Intimate mixtures of Scots pine and Sitka spruce do not increase resilience to spring drought

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. However, the direction and magnitude […]