Interview with Dr. Jakub Brichta—Winner of the Forests Best Paper Award
We are honored to announce that Dr. Jakub Brichta has been selected as a winner of the Forests 2024 Best Paper Award.
The following is an interview with Dr. Jakub Brichta:
1. Could you please give us a brief introduction of yourself (including your research field and research findings)?
I am engaged in forestry education and pedagogy, but I also work in the forest and research forest ecosystems. My main work is to disseminate information about forests and forest management, often in the form of entertaining and educational activities for children. As part of my research, I and a team from the Department of Silviculture (Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague) mainly research the impact of climate change on the vitality of forest stands, but also mitigation and adaptation of forests to changing environmental conditions. I specialize in research on Scots pine.
2. Could you briefly summarize the main findings or contributions of your award-winning paper?
Our decision to investigate the influence of climate on Scots pine growth was driven by the need to find out how climate or how a given taxon reacts to very dynamically changing environmental conditions. Scots pine is currently a very unstable tree species, not only in Central Europe, due to lack of moisture and increasing average temperatures. The above-mentioned thesis is a fact, despite the fact that we dogmatically considered pine to be highly resistant to dry periods and high temperatures.
Based on the relatively wide scope of our data on Scots pine tree growth, we decided to compare climate elements in various years and periods with Scots pine tree growth in various locations in Europe. Spectral analyses of study showed a substantial decrease in fluctuations in the tree-ring index and a loss in natural growth cyclicity in the last thirty years. The results also indicated that mean air temperature was the most important factor influencing the radial growth compared to precipitation totals. It was also found that pine still thrives in precipitation-stable localities. In general, the conclusions of this study confirm the fundamental effect of ongoing global climate change on the dynamics and growth of pine forests in Europe.
3. What was the biggest challenge you encountered during the research process? How did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge was to link the data obtained from different European countries in a relevant way. The data was of high quality but came from different environmental conditions and forest management. Our team overcame this problem by consistently selecting data from locations that we could not compare in our data set (e.g., data from forest stands with different management methods or trees with significantly different ages).
4. How does it feel to receive the Best Paper Award? What does this recognition mean to you?
It is a pleasure. I was surprised. I am happy about the award, especially because of our team: Václav, Zdeněk, Lukáš, and other teammates of the Department of Silviculture and from other workplaces in Europe. It was teamwork, so it is a team award.
5. What attracted you to submit your paper to Forests? What benefits do you believe authors gain from publishing in this journal?
We published the article in Forests primarily because of good communication with the editors and reviewers. I think authors don't have to worry whether they will receive a timely response to their submitted manuscript.
6. Which research topics do you think will be of particular interest to the research community in the coming years?
Tree species introduction; silviculture in young forests; some socio-economic topics in the context of forest management.
Thank you for the award, it is pleasure for me and for people from our collective. Thank you to my colleagues!
In conclusion, I would like to say that it is certainly necessary to create scientific outputs of a quality that will be appreciated by researchers and other academics. However, I appeal to all researchers to apply the conclusions of their research in forestry practice.