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Abstract: The consequences of accelerating climate change for land and sea biodiversity require innovative approaches to research. Interdisciplinary re-search serves to connect natural science, socialsciences and humanities, tech-nology, and engineering, as well as welcoming citizen scientists into the re-search environment. Interdisciplinarity is part of a developing innovative ap-proach to research that emphasizes co-evolution of traditional sciences, with citizen science and participatory engagement in the realisation of research goals and the promotion of climate change mitigation strategies. In this article, through the example of shellfish maricultures we illustrate interdisciplinarity, particularlydemonstrating how marine biology, health and well-being, social science and cultural geography come together at the interface between nature, culture, and climate change mitigation strategies.
Keywords: interdisciplinarity, maricultures, eco-linguistics, climate change, citizen science, ecosystem services
Published in DiRROS: 28.09.2022; Views: 539; Downloads: 275
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Abstract: Climate change is seriously impacting coastal biodiversity and the benefits it provides to humans. This issue is particularly relevant in the case of the European Union’s Natura 2000 network of areas for nature protection, where the sensitivity of local ecosystems calls for intervention to increase resistance and resilience to climate-related risks. Given the complex ways in which climate can influence conservation hotspot areas, there is a need to develop effective strategic approaches and general operational models to identify priorities for management and inform adaptation and mitigation measures. Here, a novel methodological proposal to perform climate risk assessment in Natura 2000 sites is presented that implements the systematic approach of ISO 14090 in combination with the theoretical framework of ecosystem services assessment and local stakeholder participation to identify climate-related issues for local protected habitats and improve the knowledge base needed to plan sustainable conservation and restoration measures. The methodology was applied to five Natura 2000 sites located along the Adriatic coast of Italy and Slovenia. Results show that each of the assessed sites, despite being along the coast of the same sea, is affected by different climate-related issues, impacting different habitats and corresponding ecosystem services. This novel methodology enables a simple and rapid screening for the prioritization of conservation actions and of the possible further investigations needed to support decision making, and was found to be robust and of general applicability. These findings highlight the importance of designing site-specific adaptation measures, tailored to address the peculiar response to climate change of each site in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Keywords: ecosystem, ecosystem services, climate change adaptation, nature conservation, sustainability, coastal management
Published in DiRROS: 01.07.2022; Views: 617; Downloads: 420
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Abstract: Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) is a non-native tree species in Slovenia with the potential to partially replace Norway spruce in our native forests. Compared to spruce, it has several advantages in terms of volume growth, wood quality and tolerance to drought. This is important given the changing climate in which spruce is confronted with serious problems caused by increasing temperatures and drought stress. At three sites (one on non-carbonate bedrock and deep soils, and two on limestone with soil layers of varying depths), 20 Douglas-fir and 20 spruce per site were sampled in order to compare their radial growth response to climate and drought events. The radial growth of Douglas-fir exceeds that of spruce by about 20% on comparable sites. It is more responsive to climate than spruce. Above-average temperatures in February and March have a significant positive effect on the radial growth of Douglas-fir. In recent decades, above-average summer precipitation has also had a positive influence on the radial growth of Douglas-fir. Compared to spruce, Douglas-fir is less sensitive to extreme drought events. Our results indicate that Douglas-fir may be a good substitute for spruce in semi-natural managed forest stands in Slovenia. The planting of Douglas-fir should be allowed in Slovenian forests, but the proportion of it in forest stands should be kept lower than is the case with spruce today.
Keywords: climate change, climate response, drought, radial increment, dendrochronology
Published in DiRROS: 15.06.2022; Views: 544; Downloads: 455
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Abstract: The mechanistic pathways connecting ocean-atmosphere variability and terrestrial productivity are well-established theoretically, but remain challenging to quantify empirically. Such quantification will greatly improve the assessment and prediction of changes in terrestrial carbon sequestration in response to dynamically induced climatic extremes. The jet stream latitude (JSL) over the North Atlantic-European domain provides a synthetic and robust physical framework that integrates climate variability not accounted for by atmospheric circulation patterns alone. Surface climate impacts of north-south summer JSL displacements are not uniform across Europe, but rather create a northwestern-southeastern dipole in forest productivity and radial-growth anomalies. Summer JSL variability over the eastern North Atlantic-European domain (5-40E) exerts the strongest impact on European beech, inducing anomalies of up to 30% in modelled gross primary productivity and 50% in radial tree growth. The net effects of JSL movements on terrestrial carbon fluxes depend on forest density, carbon stocks, and productivity imbalances across biogeographic regions.
Keywords: atmospheric dynamics, climate-change ecology, climate-change impacts, environmental impact
Published in DiRROS: 20.04.2022; Views: 725; Downloads: 605
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Abstract: Wood resources have been essential for human welfare throughout history. Also nowadays, the volume of growing stock (GS) is considered one of the most important forest attributes monitored by National Forest Inventories (NFIs) to inform policy decisions and forest management planning. The origins of forest inventories closely relate to times of early wood shortage in Europe causing the need to explore and plan the utilisation of GS in the catchment areas of mines, saltworks and settlements. Over time, forest surveys became more detailed and their scope turned to larger areas, although they were still conceived as stand-wise inventories. In the 1920s, the first sample-based NFIs were introduced in the northern European countries. Since the earliest beginnings, GS monitoring approaches have considerably evolved. Current NFI methods differ due to country-specific conditions, inventory traditions, and information needs. Consequently, GS estimates were lacking international comparability and were therefore subject to recent harmonisation efforts to meet the increasing demand for consistent forest resource information at European level. As primary large-area monitoring programmes in most European countries, NFIs assess a multitude of variables, describing various aspects of sustainable forest management, including for example wood supply, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity. Many of these contemporary subject matters involve considerations about GS and its changes, at different geographic levels and time frames from past to future developments according to scenario simulations. Due to its historical, continued and currently increasing importance, we provide an up-to-date review focussing on large-area GS monitoring where we i) describe the origins and historical development of European NFIs, ii) address the terminology and present GS definitions of NFIs, iii) summarise the current methods of 23 European NFIs including sampling methods, tree measurements, volume models, estimators, uncertainty components, and the use of air- and space-borne data sources, iv) present the recent progress in NFI harmonisation in Europe, and v) provide an outlook under changing climate and forest-based bioeconomy objectives.
Keywords: forest history, natural resources, sustainability, timber volume, sampling, remote sensing, bioeconomy, climate change
Published in DiRROS: 14.12.2021; Views: 764; Downloads: 544
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