Impact of the climate change on forest ecosystems: an overview of the results obtained in manipulative experiments at field scale
Paolo De Angelis
Dept. for Innovation in Biological, Agro-food and Forest systems, University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy
In the last decades several field long-term experiments has been realised to study the complex interaction about climate change drivers (elevated CO2, changing temperature and water availability, increasing the nutrient supply) and the main processes regulating the terrestrial ecosystems functioning (C-balance, water balance e nutrients cycle).
FACE experiments contributes significantly to produce a robust framework of knowledge about the impact of elevated CO2 at stand and ecosystem level, differently long term field experiments manipulating temperature are still lacking for forest ecosystems.
Furthermore, scaling the responses observed at a certain level needs an important effort on modelling the interactions among pools and the connecting processes. New approaches on model validation has been recently suggested to better integrate the observations.
Results obtained in different field experiments conducted by EcophysLab of the University of Tuscia, as part of international networks, will be presented and compared to a wide context.
We investigated the impact of elevated CO2 in a natural Mediterranean forest and in a poplar plantations, using Open Top Chambers and FACE technology. The functional changes induced by an increase of daily minimum temperature and by the duration of the drought period, were studied in a natural shrub community growing in semiarid environment.
Suggestions for new research activities will be formulated as well as for a re-active management of forests and degraded lands.