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February, 2025: Marielle defended her PhD thesis on "Effects of drought and elevated CO2 on growth and mortality of pine trees” with great success. Congratulations!
In February 2025, our working group held a two-day retreat at the Schneefernerhaus on the Zugspitze. In the midst of an impressive landscape, we had an intensive exchange about our current and future research, with a focus on optimizing internal group work structures. Inspired and motivated, we bring new perspectives back to our everyday work.
Tree mortality is rising worldwide, yet patterns and causes remain unclear. A study of nearly 467,000 forest plots highlights progress in monitoring but also data gaps. Integrating ground inventories with remote sensing could help, but requires technical solutions and fair data sharing. The study published in New Phytologist highlights that a truly global system must ensure equitable collaboration and empower scientists from less wealthy regions.
Stem shrinkage derived from dendrometer measurements provides continuous insights into the water status of trees and can be used to detect early warnings of drought stress impacts on our forests. Read more in our new publication in Tree Physiology.
New paper out in Tree Physiology about how drought and heat-induced modifications to photorespiration affect hydrogen peroxide accumulation in silver fir.
The Plant Ecophysiology course for Geoecology students from Karlsruhe took place at KIT-Campus Alpin 16-20 September 2024. The students investigated physiological and biochemical responses of temperate tree species under drought stress and subsequent post-drought recovery following rewatering. The students identified distinct species-specific drought tolerance strategies regarding photosynthesis regulation, and short-term physiological recovery following rewatering.
Processing and analyzing image stacks based on optical methods can be challenging, especially with large datasets. CaviTools offers additional tools to simplify the workflow of post-processing your Cavicam data such as automatically detecting and quantifying embolism events and filtering out artifacts.
The second IfGG-IFU Symposium took place at the KIT-Campus Alpine on 2nd and 3rd of May 2024 and it was dedicated to doctoral students and postdocs.
In addition to interesting lectures and engaging discussions, these joint symposia are valuable opportunities for networking and exchange.
The third edition of the symposium is to take place at the Aueninstitut Rastatt.
With the school forest project we support schoolkids to monitor the seasonality of tree growth by measuring stem increment via installed dendrobands. In this way, the children learn about scientific methods and get insights into the seasonal dynamics of forests.
During our group retreat, we planned research ideas for the coming year and defined our team values.
New publication out in Forestry showing canopy mortality increased tenfold during summer droughts 2018-2020 in Luxembourg
In addition to our research work, we also play excellent soccer and won this year's championship at the IMKIFU!