Διαδικτυακή Πύλη Συνεργασίας Για Τα Δάση

Forest conservation strategies and plans can be unsuccessful if the new habitat conditions determined by climate change are not considered. Our work aims at investigating the likelihood of future suitability, distribution and diversity for some common European forest species under the projected changes in climate, focusing on Southern Europe. We combine an Ensemble Platform for Species Distribution Models (SDMs) to five Global Circulation Models (GCMs) driven by two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), to produce maps of future climate-driven habitat suitability for ten categories of forest species and two time horizons. For each forest category and time horizon, ten maps of future distribution (5 GCMs by 2 RCPs) are thus combined in a single suitability map supplied with information about the “likelihood” adopting the IPCC terminology based on consensus among projections. Then, the statistical significance of spatially aggregated changes in forest composition at local and regional level is analyzed. Finally, we discuss the importance, among SDMs, that environmental predictors seem to have in influencing forest distribution. Future impacts of climate change appear to be diversified across forest categories. A strong change in forest regional distribution and local diversity is projected to take place, as some forest categories will find more suitable conditions in previously unsuitable locations, while for other categories the same new conditions will become less suited. A decrease in species diversity is projected in most of the area, with Alpine region showing the potentiality to become a refuge for species migration.

Changing climatic conditions can have various consequences for forest ecosystems, from increasing frequencies of forest fires, ice and windstorm events to pathogen outbreaks and mass mortalities. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was chosen for the evaluation of drought impact on the radial growth of trees after extensive preliminary testing of various calculated monthly climate parameters from the CARPATCLIM database. SPI was calculated for periods between 3 and 36 months for different sites (lowland and mountainous parts of Serbia, Southeast Europe), from which Quercus robur, Q. cerris, Fagus sylvatica and Pinus sylvestris samples were cquired. Bootstrapped Pearson’s correlations between SPI monthly indices and radial growth of tree species were calculated. We found that 12-month SPI for summer months may be a good predictor of positive and negative growth of different species at different sites. The strongest positive correlations for five of six tree-ring width chro­nologies were between 12-month June and 14-month September SPI, which implies that high growth rates can be expected when the autumn of the previous year, and winter, spring and summer of the current year, are well supplied with precipitation, and vice versa (low precipitation in given period/low growth rates).

A growing body of evidence suggests that processes of upward treeline expansion and shifts in vegetation zones may occur in response to climate change. However, such shifts can be limited by a variety of non-climatic factors, such as nutrient availability, soil conditions, landscape fragmentation and some species-specific traits. Many changes in species distributions have been observed, although no evidence of complete community replacement has been registered yet. Climatic signals are often confounded with the effects of human activity, for example, forest encroachment at the treeline owing to the coupled effect of climate change and highland pasture abandonment. Data on the treeline ecotone, barriers to the expected treeline or dominant tree species shifts due to climate and land use change, and their possible impacts on biodiversity in 11 mountain areas of interest, from Italy to Norway and from Spain to Bulgaria, are reported. We investigated the role of environmental conditions on treeline ecotone features with a focus on treeline shift. The results showed that treeline altitude and the altitudinal width of the treeline ecotone, as well as the significance of climatic and soil parameters as barriers against tree species shift, significantly decreased with increasing latitude. However, the largest part of the commonly observed variability in mountain vegetation near the treeline in Europe seems to be caused by geomorphological, geological, pedological and microclimatic variability in combination with different land use history and present socio-economic relations.

Ο παρών τόμος αποτελεί την πρώτη προσπάθεια ολοκληρωμένης μελέτης των επιπτώσεων της κλιματικής αλλαγής στην Ελλάδα, ειδικότερα του κόστους της κλιματικής μεταβολής για την ελληνική οικονομία, του κόστους μέτρων προσαρμογής στο μεταβαλλόμενο κλίμα, καθώς και του κόστους της μετάβασης προς μια οικονομία χαμηλών εκπομπών αερίων του θερμοκηπίου, στο πλαίσιο της παγκόσμιας προσπάθειας για μετριασμό της κλιματικής αλλαγής. Στο έργο αυτό, για πρώτη φορά συνεργάστηκαν επί διετία ομάδες από διαφορετικές επιστημονικές περιοχές, συμπεριλαμβανομένων φυσικών της ατμόσφαιρας, κλιματολόγων, γεωφυσικών, ειδικών στους τομείς της γεωργίας, των δασών και της αλιείας, ειδικών σε θέματα υδάτινων αποθεμάτων, τουρισμού, δομημένου περιβάλλοντος και ενέργειας, καθώς και οικονομολόγων και κοινωνιολόγων.