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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2020

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Abstract

The combined impact of climate and land-use change poses increasing threats to nature and nature's benefit to people. The LandPress project makes use of the severe Norwegian winter-drought in 2014 as a case study; and combines geographical, ecological and social science approaches to explore the drivers of ecosystem resilience to drought die-back, the ecological processes and implications of drought responses, and management options for mitigating damage and costs. First, by means of remote sensing, we assess the role of climate, environment and land-use in regulating resilience of Calluna heaths to drought die-back locally and along a biogeographic gradient. We find that drought-damage in heather varies across landscapes, and can be quantified by aerial photos, allowing us to establish that both environment (slope) and land-use (prescribed fire) influence ecosystem resistance to drought. Second, we conduct a drought experiment to understand and assess the impacts of severe drought events on coastal heathland ecosystem dynamics and functioning. After the three first years we find only weak effects on plant communities, but distinct responses in plant functional traits suggesting that ecosystem resistance to drought decreases with time since the last prescribed fire. Third, we experimentally assess whether prescribed burning can be used to promote Calluna's resilience after severe drought, and find that prescribed burning efficiently removes damaged heather, stimulating post-fire vegetation development and restore ecosystem functioning after drought. Finally, we conduct a cost-benefit analysis to understand the contribution of land management to the provision of ecosystem services, with focus on securing low fire-risk landscapes. We find that management has more benefits than food production; land-use can reduce the extent of extreme drought, reduce fire risk and help us keep the ecosystem functioning. Our project demonstrates the importance of understanding how interactions between climate-change and land-use and is crucial in developing new management strategies.

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The European Boreal Forest Vegetation Database (EBFVD, GIVD ID: EU-00-027) is a repository for vegetation-plot data from the forests of the boreal and hemiboreal zones of Europe. In this report, we describe its structure, current content and future perspectives opened up by the database. In February 2019, the database contained 13 037 vegetation-plot records from Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Russia and Sweden that are not yet stored in the databases of the European Vegetation Archive (EVA). Consequently, this database significantly improves the availability of forest plant community data from Northern Europe. The database is managed by the Vegetation Science Group, Department of Botany and Zoology, Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), in the TURBOVEG 2 program. It is registered in the Global Index of Vegetation Plot Databases (GIVD) and included in EVA. The whole database, or a subset of it, can be requested via EVA, or directly from the database custodian.

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The categorical and qualitative nature of currently available soil structural data along with the lack of a geographically broad dataset have impeded progress in understanding the development of soil structure. In this study, we assembled a soil, climate, and ecological dataset for the USA, and used it to analyze relationships between soil structure (ped type, shape, size, and grade) and exogenous and endogenous variables influencing the development of soil structure. We analyzed a subset of the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) Soil Characterization database after merging this information with climatological and ecological data. The merged and cleaned dataset contains >4400 observations from approximately 1600 pedons. We found that climate, as an exogenous factor was the most important predictor of ped shape and size. Cold and/or dry climates promoted the development of larger anisotropic peds with rougher surfaces whereas warmer and more humid climates promoted the development of finer equidimensional peds with smoother surfaces. Based on these findings, we argue that climate promotes the development of soil structure along either fragmentation or aggregation pathways. The former pathway is characterized by largely mechanical processes in cold and dry environments, whereas aggregation is promoted by predominately biological and chemical mechanisms found in warmer and wet environments. This connection between climate and the development of soil structure represents a potentially important effect of climate on a morphological property strongly linked to soil hydrology that warrants further investigation with continental-scale soil data.