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Environments
Special Issues
Forest Ecosystems in Europe under Climate Change
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Forest Ecosystems in Europe under Climate Change

A special issue of Environments (ISSN 2076-3298).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 November 2023) | Viewed by 5049

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Daniele De Rigo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Maieutike Research Initiative, Milan, Italy
Interests: integrated natural resources modelling and management; forests; semantics and multiplicity; uncertainty; environment; climate change; ecosystem services; risk; sustainability

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

European forest ecosystems, same as elsewhere on Earth, already manifest the effects of climate change. Some observed effects differ from what our partial understanding is currently able to predict, highlighting a lack of data and knowledge integration, and the potential for our anticipated scenarios to prove inadequate to tackle the future pace and magnitude of changes. European forests range from subtropical to temperate and boreal conditions, with several mountain systems, in a densely populated continent with fragmented landscapes—where a multitude of human-driven pressures and other forest disturbances add complexity and uncertainty to the impact of climate change. The interplay of these factors may alter forests in ways not obvious when single pressures are analyzed in isolation.

Although the broad heterogeneity of forests and other woodland in Europe would require far more harmonized data than those currently available, Europe is nevertheless one of the continents where more literature exists. This makes any progress in the understanding of knowledge gaps on the effects of climate change over European forests even more important, since part of this progress may have the potential to shine light over more general mechanisms which may apply to the forests in other regions of the Earth—where data and research are not as intensive as in Europe.

This Special Issue focuses on original research, critical reviews, and perspectives on qualitative and quantitative aspects, data and knowledge integration on the topics outlined here.

Dr. Daniele De Rigo
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Environments is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • forest ecosystems
  • climate change
  • integrated natural resources modeling and management
  • forest disturbances
  • anthropogenic change
  • feedbacks and qualitative modelling
  • modeling uncertainty and unknown
  • tipping points
  • Europe

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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10 pages, 705 KiB  
Perspective
On the Inclusion of Adaptive Potential in Species Distribution Models: Towards a Genomic-Informed Approach to Forest Management and Conservation
by Elia Vajana, Michele Bozzano, Maurizio Marchi and Andrea Piotti
Environments 2023, 10(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/environments10010003 - 21 Dec 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 4210
Abstract
Ecological modeling refers to the construction and analysis of mathematical models aimed at understanding the complexity of ecological processes and at predicting how real ecosystems might evolve. It is a quickly expanding approach boosted by impressive accelerations in the availability of computational resources [...] Read more.
Ecological modeling refers to the construction and analysis of mathematical models aimed at understanding the complexity of ecological processes and at predicting how real ecosystems might evolve. It is a quickly expanding approach boosted by impressive accelerations in the availability of computational resources and environmental databases. In the light of foreseeing the effect of climate change on forest ecosystems, the branch of ecological modeling focusing on species distribution models (SDMs) has become widely used to estimate indices of habitat suitability and to forecast future tree distributions. However, SDMs are usually informed based solely on environmental data without any reference to the genetic makeup underlying responses to the environment, the possibility of exchanging variants helping to persist in situ, or the capacity to chase suitable conditions elsewhere. Among the main evolutionary processes that may complement forecasts of range shifts are local adaptation and gene flow, i.e., the occurrence of genetic variants conferring a population the optimal fitness in its own habitat and the exchange of adaptive alleles between populations. Local adaptation and gene flow could be described by indices of genetic diversity and structure, genetic load, genomic offset, and an admixture of genetic lineages. Here, we advocate for the development of a new analytical approach integrating environmental and genomic information when projecting tree distributions across space and time. To this aim, we first provide a literature review on the use of genetics when modeling intraspecific responses to the environment, and we then discuss the potential improvements and drawbacks deriving from the inclusion of genomic data into the current SDM framework. Finally, we speculate about the potential impacts of genomic-informed predictions in the context of forest conservation and provide a synthetic framework for developing future forest management strategies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Ecosystems in Europe under Climate Change)
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