Project duration: January 2025 – January 2028
As seen in the recent drought-induced forest dieback and growth reduction in Europe and around the world, climate change has a devastating effect on forest ecosystems. Therefore, new strategies for stabilising existing forests are urgently needed. A key challenge for forest management is that most stress predictions neglect potentially important belowground processes.
This project investigates the effect of two such belowground processes—(i) deep water dynamics and (ii) species mixture—on the resilience of forest ecosystems to water stress using coupled ecohydrological–plant hydraulic modelling, constrained by field data of stable water isotopes, tree water stress, and sapflow.
In this project, TEE lab will couple an ecohydrological (SERGHEI) and a plant hydraulic model (SurEau-Ecos) to investigate topographic controls on deep water in a spatially distributed manner.
sTREssE is a bilateral research project carried out by:
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the French National Agency for Research (ANR) under Projectnumber 54576575.