Speaker
Description
Mountain Norway spruce-dominated forests are highly sensitive to climate warming, drought, windthrow and bark beetle outbreaks, while providing key ecosystem services such as carbon storage, biodiversity conservation, timber production and soil protection. BIOFORMA examines how adaptive forest management can act as a nature-based solution for climate adaptation and mitigation in these vulnerable mountain landscapes.
The project covers four European case study areas, from marginal and relict spruce populations in the Croatian Dinaric Alps and Bulgarian Rhodopes to core distribution areas in the Romanian Carpathians and Swiss Alps. This presentation provides a first-year overview of BIOFORMA, with emphasis on the Croatian case study area on the Northern Velebit massif. This area includes one of the southernmost marginal populations of Norway spruce in Europe, where drought, insect outbreaks and warming have contributed to forest decline and increasing competition from broadleaved species.
BIOFORMA combines standardized forest inventories, biodiversity assessments, dendroecology, remote sensing and forest growth modelling. Forest structure will be assessed in 500 plots within 100 stands representing unmanaged forests and different management systems. Biodiversity will be evaluated across several taxonomic and functional groups, including vascular plants, bryophytes, fungi, soil microorganisms, insects and birds, and linked to structural attributes such as canopy openness, deadwood, regeneration, microhabitats and stand heterogeneity.
The central hypothesis is that continuous-cover forest management, combined with small set-aside patches that maintain microhabitat diversity, can enhance landscape-level biodiversity while sustaining forest functions and increasing resilience under future climate conditions. By linking forest structure, biodiversity and future climate-management scenarios, BIOFORMA will identify trade-offs and synergies between production forestry, habitat suitability, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision.
By integrating field inventories, biodiversity monitoring, dendroecology, remote sensing and modelling, BIOFORMA aims to provide a science-based framework for climate-smart and biodiversity-oriented management of mountain spruce forests, supporting nature-based climate adaptation across the alpine biogeographical region of Europe
| Are you participating to the "AnaEE Environmental Rising Star Award "? | No |
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