New Publication: Effect of the 2022 summer drought across forest types in Europe

Our recent study shows that the 2022 summer drought significantly compromised the photosynthetic capacity of trees, leading to widespread declines in vegetation functioning across Europe, especially in deciduous broadleaf forests. Despite less severe overall conditions compared to previous extreme years, the greater canopy damage observed in 2022 suggests a growing vulnerability of forests to drought. Read the full article here.

News article about our research station

"A laboratory in nature" is the title of an article about our research station in the Amtsvenn-Hündfelder Moor, published in the newspaper of the University of Münster. Read the full article in both German and English here. 

New Publication: X-BASE - the first terrestrial carbon and water flux products from an extended data-driven scaling framework, FLUXCOM-X

The latest global FLUXNET net ecosystem exchange of CO2, H2O, gross primary productivity, and evapotranspiration upscaling for 2001-2021 (daily 0.25 degree, monthly 0.05 deg) - Fluxcom-X paper led by Jacob Nelson (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena) is now out in Biogeosciences. Read the full paper here.

Amstvenn is now officially an ICOS station

The Institute of Landscape Ecology of the University of Münster is now officially part of the ICOS Research Infrastructure network. After a labelling process that started in January 2024, on November 6th our eddy covariance station in the Amtsvenn-Hündfelder Moor was officially assigned an ICOS label. Having this label guarantees the highest quality standards for greenhouse gas measurements, underscoring our commitment to excellence in climate research.

Our station in Amtsvenn is the only station across this European network that with already 2 full years of gas measurements before rewetting, will enable us to quantify greenhouse gases before, during and after rewetting measures.

At the ICOS Science Conference 2024 in Versailles France, Mana Gharun, Ana Bastos, and Thanos Gkritzalis organized and chaired a session about climate extremes and greenhouse gas fluxes. The session attracted many interesting contributions from all three domains of ecosystem, atmosphere, and oceans.

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This summer semester, the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group offered a new block course Advanced Methods in Applied Ecophysiology. In this course the students practiced designing an experiment in the field, collected measurements with hand-held devices, analyzed their data and presented their results. Plus they had fun working outside!

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Professor Mana Gharun took part in the first Summer School on “Assessment of Tropical Forest and Soil Resources” in Fort Portal, Uganda. She taught participants about soil greenhouse gas fluxes and how to measure them with low-cost sensors. The event was a joint effort, organized with colleagues from ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Ghent University (Belgium), the University of Augsburg (Germany), the Kyaninga Forest Foundation (Uganda), and Mountains of the Moon University (Uganda).

With global warming, forests are increasingly exposed to “compound soil and atmospheric drought” (CSAD) events, characterized by low soil water content (SWC) and high vapour pressure deficit (VPD). Such CSAD events trigger responses in both ecosystem and forest-floor CO2 fluxes, which we know little about. In this study, the objectives were (1) to characterize CSAD events at CH-Lae, (2) to quantify the impact of CSAD events on ecosystem and forest-floor CO2 fluxes, and (3) to identify the major drivers and their temporal contributions to changing ecosystem and forest-floor CO2 fluxes during CSAD events and CSAD growing seasons. Read more here.

Our dataset of leaf water potential measurements collected at the subalpine Norway spruce forest of Davos-Seehornwald from 2020 to 2022 is now published.

Measurements were collected as part of project FEVER.

Paper from the BSc thesis project of our student of landscape ecology Elisa Jordan is now published in Journal Atmosphere. Elisa researched the assessment of the volatility of the daily maximum temperature in Germany between 1990 and 2022. Read more here.

Paper from the MSc thesis project of former student at ETH Zürich and Eawag, Capucine Marion is now published in Tree Physiology. In this research Capucine developed a new method for in-situ measurement of dissolved gases in trees: Read more here

Prof Gharun awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Prof Gharun has been awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation as the Henriette Herz scout. With this opportunity she can nominate 3 talented researchers from abroad to join the biosphere-atmosphere interaction group as a postdoc.

Warm Welcome to Yu Luo

A warm welcome to our new PhD candidate Yu Luo who joined the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group on 1 May. Yu will be working on the acclimation of global forest ecosystems to cascading drought and heatwave events.

New paper from project COCO

Congratulations to PhD candidate Luana Krebs for the publication of her first paper in the journal of Biogeosciences! Luana looked into drivers and annual budgets of the forest-floor respiration, N2O fluxes, and CH4 fluxes in the subalpine forest Davos-Seehornwald in Switzerland. You can now read the full paper here.

Our PhD candidate Nicolas Behrens presented exciting results of his global peatland eddy covariance flux measurements at the EGU conference in Vienna, in a session about "Budgets, Trends, and Drivers of Major Greenhouse Gases from Regional to Global scales". 

Our BSc Landscape Ecology student Elisa Jordan presented the results of her Bachelor thesis entitled "Assessing extreme temperature volatilities across Germany between 1990 and 2022" at the EGU conference in Vienna, Austria. The presentation was marked as the "highlight" of a session on land-atmosphere interactions and climate extremes.

New paper from project FEVER

New paper from our project FEVER now published in the journal of Weather and Climate Extremes shows increasing air temperatures lead to drier air & soil, impacting ecosystems & climate modulation. We observed across Europe a 1.2x increase in extreme dryness from 1991-2021, with projections under RCP8.5 suggesting a 4.6x rise by late-21st century! Read the full paper here. 

Happy International Women´s Day

Happy International Women´s Day from the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group! Read an interview of ICOS-RI with Mana Gharun, re-posted from last year:

https://www.icos-cp.eu/event/1280

New paper from our project FEVER, and led by Ankit Shekhar is now published in Science of the Total Environment. Using long-term ecosystem-level carbon and water flux measurements, and long-term tree-level dendrometer and sapflow measurements we show that in the context of drought response, it matters to assess soil or atmospheric drought, because forests respond differently to these or their compounds. 

CH4 analyzer installed in Amtsvenn

We have now added a CH4 analyzer to the eddy covariance system at our ICOS candidate flux station Amtsvenn-Hündfelder Moor. We are very happy to see the very first set of measurements! Thanks especially to the group of Prof Otto Klemm for lending us their methane analyzer!

Luana Krebs at the 21st Swiss Geoscience Meeting

At the 21st Swiss Geoscience Meeting this year Luana Krebs presented very nice results from the second study of her PhD thesis"25 years of net ecosystem CO₂ exchange in a subalpine spruce forest". Great job Luana! 

Today we close the first annual carbon budget for our recently established peatland eddy covariance station Amtsvenn (DE-Amv). The peatland has emitted 158 gC/m2 in one year (between October 2022 and October 2023).

Maintaining continuous high quality flux measurements are hard work but extremely necessary for determining the role ecosystems as carbon sinks or sources, and making informed decisions about land use, conservation, restoration, and climate change mitigation strategies.

Recent study published in Communications Earth & Environment

25Co-optimization of CO₂ uptake and albedo effects enhances impact of forests on cooling the climate. How? Find out in our recent study now published in Communications Earth & Environment. 

Lockdown Reduced Air Pollution Across Europe

Spring 2020 lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic led to reduced air pollution across Europe. In a recent study now published in the Science of Total Environment we explored how this reduced emission of pollutants affected radiation and consequently plant productivity across ecosystems in Europe. 

Warm Welcome to Giorgos Xanthopoulos

A warm welcome to Giorgos Xanthopoulos, PhD candidate from Democritus University of Thrace , who is visiting our group on a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) within CLEANFOREST Cost Action project. The PhD project of Giorgos is about measuring and understanding carbon and water dynamics of natural Aleppo pine ecosystems. 

Excursion to the Swiss Alps

"How is climate change affecting  the ecosystem functioning and biosphere-atmopshere interaction processes in mountain ecosystems?" This was the topic of a 5-day excursion to the Swiss Alps (24-28 July 2023), offered for the first time by the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group. During this excursion students hiked up to forest and grassland ecosystems along elevation gradients, visited long-term monitoring sites and transplant experiments, and collected their own measurements.

Eddy Covariance Station will join the Network of ICOS RI

We are happy to announce that our newly established eddy covariance station in Amstvenn-Hündfelder Moor will join the network of ICOS RI, the steering committee of ICOS Germany has informed us! ICOS RI is the Integrated Carbon Observation Network Research Infrastructure that generates standardized, high-precision, long-term observations of the carbon cycle with the aim to reduce uncertainties in corresponding model predictions, to warn of negative developments at an early stage and to initiate adaptation measures in time, and to evaluate the success of climate protection measures.

The labelling process for Amtsvenn will start in January 2024!

Increased intensity and frequency of atmospheric dryness is not changing the resistance of forests to drought in terms of net ecosystem productivity! Read our latest paper led by PhD student Ankit Shekhar published now in Global Change Biology. 

Congratuations to Ankit Shekhar

Congratuations to Ankit Shekhar for successfully defending his doctoral thesis on forest vulnerability to extreme dryness. Visit Ankit´s list of publications to find out more what he has been working on during his PhD. 

First Annual Meeting of the COST Action Project CLEANFOREST

The first annual meeting of the COST Action project CLEANFOREST took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, with +80 particiapnts. The BAI group is co-leading the third working group on interactions between global change drivers and tree and soil biogeochemical processes and is looking forwared to fruitful collaborations over the next coming years!

Nicolas Behrens at EGU2023 in Vienna

This year at EGU2023 in Vienna, Nicolas Behrens presented what he has been working on over the past 8 months of his PhD project and had fruitful discussions. The title of Nicolas´ presentation was: Disentangling biotic and abiotic drivers of CO2 flux in a drained German peatland using eddy covariance flux measurements and modelling techniques. 

Workshop on "Ecosystem-Atmosphere Interactions and Nature-Based Climate Solutions"

The 2-days workshop on "Ecosystem-Atmosphere Interactions and Nature-Based Climate Solutions" organized by the Eco-Meteorology group at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena was an exciting opportunity to present our research and discuss scientific ideas and developments across a range of ecosystem types relevant for mitigating climate change. 

Session at EGU2023 in Vienna

Happy to announce that this year (also) we will have a session focused on “Novel methods for bridging process-based and data-driven modelling of carbon, energy, and water fluxes from leaf to continental scales” at EGU2023 in Vienna, Austria.

This session will take place on 27-28 April, with many exciting presentations and a keynote by Prof. Dr. Christiane Werner from the University of Freiburg.

New Publication

Surfaces soil of 48% of global vegetated area has dried over the past 40 years! Find out more in our recent study now published in Science of the Total Environment.

Warm Welcome to Visweshwar Arulmozhi Nambi

The Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group welcomes Visweshwar Arulmozhi Nambi who will be working on his MSc thesis project  "Assessment of structural and topographic influences on greenhouse gas flux observations using a footprint model and LIDAR measurements in a peatland ecosystem". The project is an exciting collaboration between Institute of Landscape Ecology and Institute for Geoinformatics. 

New Publication

Wondering how well do solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) products explain global terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP)? Find out in our latest study published now in the Remote Sensing of Environment journal.

Eddy Covariance Flux Tower installed

The first eddy covariance flux tower of the group of Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction was successfully installed in the Amtsvenn-Hündfelder Moor in September. We are looking forward to collecting exciting greenhouse gas flux measurements from this relevant ecosystem, educating students, and extending our collaborations with the national and international community!

Warm Welcome to Nicolas Behrens

Congratulations to Nicolas Behrens for officially starting his PhD at the BAI research group. Over the next 3 years Nicolas will be working on measuring and understanding greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands. Welcome Nicolas!

New Publication

How do forests modulate soil water storage during severe drought? Read our recent study led by Katrin Meusburger at WSL now published in Global Change Biology!

Back at EGU

It was great being back at EGU and this time in person! We had a great session thanks to our fantastic speakers and a great audience. Looking forward to continuing our discussions on challenges that scaling carbon and water fluxes entail.

Congratulations to Capucine Marion

Congratulations to my M.Sc. student Capucine Marion for successfuly submitting her thesis on "Measuring Dissolved Gases in Tree Xylem Sap" at ETH Zürich. Capucine will be presenting results of her M.Sc. research project at the next Goldschmidt 2022 Conference in Hawaiʻi, USA. Well done Capucine!

The 5th ICOS Science Conference

The 5th ICOS Science Conference takes place in Utrecht Netherlands 13-15 September 2022 The overarching theme of the conference is "Tracking progress to carbon neutrality”. If you are interested in climate extremes and greenhouse gas emissions the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group invites you to submit your abstract to our session G.2. Abstract submission deadline is 11 April 2022 at 11.00 am CET.

Field Visit to Amtsvenn Peatland

Field visit to Amtsvenn peatland to evaluate the site for setting up a new eddy covariance measurement station. Our plan is to quantify emissions and uptake of greenhouse gases in a system-based approach and in collaboration with several other working groups within ILÖK as part of an interdisciplinary research project.