Andrea Hevia, PhD

Forests provide an important number of ecological services to human society (carbon sequestration, goods production, biodiversity, water conservation, etc.) but they will experience important changes in the near future due to global change (climate change, pollution, etc.) as well as changes in forest management. Competition for resources (space, light, but particularly water and nutrients) will change in ways never experienced before owing to the changes that climate change and atmospheric pollution are already causing.

The best way to estimate how these changes could affect forests in the future is by learning from the past: combining historical records of climate and nutrient cycling with long-term field monitoring data. Such data can then be used to calibrate and evaluate ecological models that simulate ecophysiological processes and forest management practices, and their impact on forest ecosystems ́ structure and functioning.

However, currently there is no way to know how nutrient cycling has changed during a forest ́s life span, which can last from decades to centuries. Nutrient cycles can be estimated only during the period for which field measurements exist. Unfortunately, few of such long-term monitoring plans are representative of what happens during a stands ́ life span, as only in a few experimental forests around the world there are data series longer than a few years.

The results of this project will open a research line pioneer in the world, and they will allow a better management of nutritional aspects in Spanish and European forests, more adapted to the inexorable environmental changes that the future will bring.