Summary
We investigate how changing forest productivity, disturbances and management influence forest resilience and the contribution of forests to meet increasing demands for forest products and ecosystem services. More specifically, we study the role of changing forest processes and disturbances as well as adaptation and mitigation measures for determining forest ecosystem resilience. These analyses allow for assessing the sustainable resource provisioning from forests, their contribution to climate mitigation and bioeconomy value-chains as well as ensuing trade-offs between various ecosystem services. Besides dedicated modelling of European forests using the process-based model 4C, the group integrates expertise on global forest resources, carbon cycling, disturbances and biodiversity from vegetation and biodiversity modelling within ISIMIP. These activities will support evidence-based, integrated ecosystem management and decision-making.
Models
Recent Key Outputs:
- Twin-study in Nature Climate Change on the attribution of global burned area (Burton et al. 2024) and health effects of fire smoke (Park et al. 2024) to climate change (see related NCC editorial)
- Study showing that increasing aridity velocity threatens biodiversity around the globe published in PNAS (Shi et al. 2021)
- PROFOUND Database: Freely available database to set-up and evaluate models to study climate impacts on forests in Europe. This database is the basis for the simulations of the regional forest sector in ISIMIP (www.isimip.org). (Reyer at al. 2020a, 2020b)
- The 4C Model developed at PIK over the past 20 years has been released as an open access model with an application to the PROFOUND Database (Lasch-Born et al. 2020)
- Study showing the mitigation potential of buildings made out of engineered timber (Churkina et al. 2020, Recipient of the Aquila Capital Transformation award)
Completed projects
Selected publications
Guests and external researchers
