Dieback on Drought-Prone Forest Ecosystems

Dear Colleagues,

The world is rapidly getting warmer, and mortality events rose over the past 30 years in forest ecosystems through growth decline, loss of vigour, and in many cases, death, revealing the high vulnerability of many forests in all biomes. These episodes have the potential to rapidly alter ecosystem services, with important implications for the carbon–water balance, nutrient cycling, and population and community dynamics. Besides the presence of inciting (e.g., heat and drought events) and contributing factors (e.g., opportunistic biotic agents), the predisposition of particular species, populations, or individuals of a given species is considered as central to understanding why some organisms survive while others succumb to climatic stress. There is also a knowledge gap about the role of intraspecific trait variability, which might be caused either by genetic or local environmental differences, on determining key mechanisms leading to mortality events such as the carbon starvation–hydraulic failure model for plants.

This Special Issue of Forests calls to join efforts to improve our understanding of how ecosystems respond to changes in climate and which functional or structural traits make some species more prone to dieback and mortality episodes. We propose multidisciplinary contributions using varied disciplines such as ecophysiology, functional ecology, forest pathology, dendroecology, remote sensing, and modelling. Authors should address ecological and management aspects, including mitigation and adaptation to the environmental risks faced by forests globally. Contributions including experimental, observational, and theoretical studies are welcome for any biomes or scale.

Dr. Raúl Sánchez-Salguero
Dr. Luis Matías
Dr. Jesús Julio Camarero
Guest Editors

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