Cross-Scale Approaching for the Assessment of Structural and Functional Impacts on Mixed Forest by Climate Change

Dear Colleagues,

Global climate change is projected to affect ecosystems and valuable services at multiple scales and processes. A main challenge in planning for global change is to identify the scales over which ecosystem processes will be impacted. Global-scale processes, such as CO₂ fertilization or temperature increase affect water-use efficiency and biomass allocation patterns, while processes such as drought and species migration affect plant growth, mortality and disturbance patterns at regional scale. Local processes, such as competition or physical damage affect plant growth and mortality patterns. Factors at different scales could be interacting and, therefore, separately assessing these impacts may lead to mismatches of potential management interventions with processes that affect ecosystem services, such as water yield and carbon sequestration. Cross-scale interactions can be important when considering climate change as they give rise to nonlinear or threshold responses that can overwhelm the effects of processes at other scales. Viewing forests as complex adaptive systems can provide insights into ecosystem processes, highlighting and emphasizing cross-scale, hierarchical interactions. Nowadays, it is a great challenge to elaborate conceptual models and predictive algorithms on the effects of climate change on important functional processes such as carbon assimilation and efficiency in the use of water in mixed forests. The purpose of this Special Issue is to define methodological approaches aimed at evaluating the impacts of climate change on the structural and functional processes of mixed forests throughout the cross-scale interactions.

Prof. Marcello Vitale
Guest Editor

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