Combining national forest inventories reveals distinct role of climate on tree recruitment in European forests

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F86652079%3A_____%2F25%3A00619490" target="_blank" >RIV/86652079:_____/25:00619490 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380025000985" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380025000985</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2025.111112" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2025.111112</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Combining national forest inventories reveals distinct role of climate on tree recruitment in European forests

Original language description

Tree recruitment forms an essential process in forest growth models as it determines the amount and composition of the next generation of trees and, hence, the provision of forest ecosystem services over long time spans. With global change and the hereby associated changes in environmental conditions and forest management adaptations, the common static tree recruitment modelling approaches have become largely obsolete and necessitated the development of more dynamic models. Limited by the availability of data for the parameterisation of tree recruitment processes, such models have only been developed for single species or national frameworks and largely failed to detect climatic influences. In this study, we developed a dynamic tree recruitment model for Europe, utilising National Forest Inventory data from 8 countries with more than 95,000 repeated plot observations and nearly 138,000 individual tree recruitment events. We investigated the effect of forest management, forest structure, soil characteristics, nutrient deposition and five groups of weather and climate variables on the quantity and the species composition of recruiting trees. The climatic groups spanned annual averages, intra annual averages, annual variability, intra annual extremes and a combination of the aforementioned groups. The model with the combination of climate and weather variables outperformed all other groups. We found distinct climatic effects on tree recruitment quantities linked to water limitations and temperature extremes. The results as such showed that tree recruitment quantities benefit from stable climatic conditions, high precipitation and suffer from high maximum temperatures. Increasing temperatures also facilitate the share of recruiting broadleaves. The recruitment species was largely determined by the lead species in a plot, indicating the importance of seed limitation. Furthermore, the results confirm the important role of forest structure in tree recruitment and enable forest managers to steer the next generation of trees. Especially multi-species stands show a clear advantage over single species stands regarding tree recruitment quantities and diverse species compositions. Our research enables dynamic and state-of-the-art recruitment simulations across forests in Europe. It presents a reproducible method that can be applied to forest simulation modelling frameworks.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10618 - Ecology

Project

<a href="/en/project/EH22_008%2F0004635" target="_blank" >EH22_008/0004635: AdAgriF - Advanced methods of greenhouse gases emission reduction and sequestration in agriculture and forest landscape for climate change mitigation</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Ecological Modelling

ISSN

0304-3800

e-ISSN

1872-7026

Volume of the periodical

505

Issue of the periodical within the volume

Jun.

Country of publishing house

NL - THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS

Number of pages

14

Pages from-to

111112

UT code for WoS article

001465857500001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-105001938601