Seeing the forest through the trees: how tree-level measurements can help understand forest dynamics.
Seeing the forest through the trees: how tree-level measurements can help understand forest dynamics.
复制标题
透过树木看森林：树级测量如何帮助了解森林动态。
作者：
P. Zuidema;P. van der Sleen
One of the main challenges in forest ecology is to understand and predict forest responses to climate change, climate extremes and disturbances (McDowell et al., 2020). Forest monitoring and remote-sensing studies have shown that these responses can be strong (Phillips et al., 2009) and long lasting (Wigneron et al., 2020), with implications for carbon sequestration (Wigneron et al., 2020) and community composition (Esquivel-Muelbert et al., 2019). However, monitoring studies at the whole-forest level contribute little to understanding the mechanisms driving those responses. Such insights need to be obtained from observations of individual trees, because it is at this level that drought, heat, fire, insect outbreaks and other disturbances affect tree photosynthesis, water transport, growth rate and mortality risk. Forest-level responses to climatic extremes and disturbances emerge from the aggregation of these tree-level effects. Therefore, a better understanding and better predictions of forest responses to changing conditions require individual-tree response studies (Zuidema et al., 2013; Sass-Klaassen et al., 2016). In this issue of New Phytologist, Piponiot et al. (2022; pp. 1664–1677) take an important step in this direction through the first global analysis of size-dependent contributions of trees to forest biomass dynamics. The authors use millions of tree stem measurements from 25 forest monitoring plots to calculate size distributions of woody biomass, productivity and mortality. A unique and powerful characteristic of their Forest Global Environmental Observatory (ForestGEO) network is that thin trees (1–10 cm stem diameter) are measured in large plots (4– 52 ha). The Piponiot et al. study proves that this extremely labourintensive sampling of small trees pays off.
影响因子：
11.6
作者：
Heilman, Kelly A.;Dietze, Michael C.;Evans, Margaret E. K.
通讯作者：
Evans, Margaret E. K.