Publications related to Seeing the forest for the trees through metabolic scaling

Fungal community composition predicts forest carbon storage at a continental scale

Forest soils harbor hyper-diverse microbial communities which fundamentally regulate carbon and nutrient cycling across the globe. Directly testing hypotheses on how microbiome diversity is linked to forest carbon storage has been difficult, due to a lack ...

Nature Portfolio2024

From roots to canopy: Unraveling the influence of species diversity on tree water relations under warmer and drier climates

Eugénie Isabelle Mas

The worsening of drought events with rising air temperature alters tree water relations causing severe hydraulic impairments and widespread forest mortality. Mixing tree species with contrasting hydraulic traits could reduce forest vulnerability to extreme ...

EPFL2024

Regional uniqueness of tree species composition and response to forest loss and climate change

Devis Tuia, Nina Marion Aurélia Van Tiel, Loïc Pellissier

The conservation and restoration of forest ecosystems require detailed knowledge of the native plant compositions. Here, we map global forest tree composition and assess the impacts of historical forest cover loss and climate change on trees. The global oc ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Soil warming alters tree water use and canopy stomatal conductance in a mixed subtropical forest

Charlotte Grossiord, Christoph Bachofen

As air temperature and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) increase continuously, forests are losing more water through evapotranspiration, with large consequences for local and global hydrological cycles. In regions with high vegetation cover, soil warming can b ...

Elsevier2024

Twenty years of irrigation acclimation is driven by denser canopies and not by plasticity in twig- and needle-level hydraulics in a Pinus sylvestris forest

Charlotte Grossiord, Eugénie Isabelle Mas, Christoph Bachofen, Alex Tunas Corzon, Hervé Cochard, Alice Jacqueline Frédérique Gauthey

Climate change is predicted to increase atmospheric vapor pressure deficit, exacerbating soil drought, and thus enhancing tree evaporative demand and mortality. Yet, few studies have addressed the longer-term drought acclimation strategy of trees, particul ...

Oxford Univ Press2024

River ecosystem metabolism and carbon biogeochemistry in a changing world

Enrico Bertuzzo, Tom Ian Battin, Luis Gómez Gener

River networks represent the largest biogeochemical nexus between the continents, ocean and atmosphere. Our current understanding of the role of rivers in the global carbon cycle remains limited, which makes it difficult to predict how global change may al ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Wind, Hail, and Climate Extremes: Modelling and Attribution Studies for Environmental Data

Ophélia Mireille Anna Miralles

This thesis presents work at the junction of statistics and climate science. We first provide methodology for use by climate scientists when performing fast event attribution using extreme value theory, and then describe two interdisciplinary projects in c ...

EPFL2023

Mapping forest in the Swiss Alps treeline ecotone with explainable deep learning

Devis Tuia, Thiên-Anh Claris Nguyen, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger

Forest maps are essential to understand forest dynamics. Due to the increasing availability of remote sensing data and machine learning models like convolutional neural networks, forest maps can these days be created on large scales with high accuracy. Com ...

Elsevier2022

Canopy dieback and recovery in Australian native forests following extreme drought

Alice Jacqueline Frédérique Gauthey

In 2019, south-eastern Australia experienced its driest and hottest year on record, resulting in massive canopy dieback events in eucalypt dominated forests. A subsequent period of high precipitation in 2020 provided a rare opportunity to quantify the impa ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Warming may extend tree growing seasons and compensate for reduced carbon uptake during dry periods

Yann Vitasse, Charlotte Grossiord, Eugénie Isabelle Mas, Christoph Bachofen, Margaux Clara Lou Didion-Gency

Warming and drought alter plant phenology, photosynthesis and growth with important consequences for the global carbon cycle and the earth’s climate. Yet, few studies have attempted to tease apart their effects on tree phenology, particularly leaf senes ...

2022

Pan-Arctic seasonal cycles and long-term trends of aerosol properties from 10 observatories

Julia Schmale, Jakob Boyd Pernov

Even though the Arctic is remote, aerosol properties observed there are strongly influenced by anthropogenic emissions from outside the Arctic. This is particularly true for the so-called Arctic haze season (January through April). In summer (June through ...

Copernicus Publications2022

Thermally activated flow in models of amorphous solids

Marko Popovic, Matthieu Wyart, Wencheng Ji, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

Amorphous solids yield at a critical value Sigma(c) of the imposed stress Sigma through a dynamical phase transition. While sharp in athermal systems, the presence of thermal fluctuations leads to the rounding of the transition and thermally activated flow ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2021

A Scaling Law for SPAD Pixel Miniaturization

Edoardo Charbon, Kazuhiro Morimoto

The growing demands on compact and high-definition single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays have motivated researchers to explore pixel miniaturization techniques to achieve sub-10 μm pixels. The scaling of the SPAD pixel size has an impact on key perfo ...

2021

Substantial decrease in CO2 emissions from Chinese inland waters due to global change

Tom Ian Battin

Carbon dioxide (CO2) evasion from inland waters is an important component of the global carbon cycle. However, it remains unknown how global change affects CO2 emissions over longer time scales. Here, we present seasonal and annual fluxes of CO2 emissions ...

Nature Research2021

Diversité des lichens et enjeux de gestion dans les forêts de Montricher

Rita Bütler Sauvain

Two lichenological studies were conducted in the Montricher forests, one on lignicolous lichens of stumps in 2005 and the other on lichens of the different forest types in 2015. The synthesis of the two allows to establish a reference state of forest liche ...

2021

Hydrological trends and the evolution of catchment research in the Alptal valley, central Switzerland

Ilja van Meerveld, Jana Freiin von Freyberg

When the observation of small headwater catchments in the pre-Alpine Alptal valley (central Switzerland) started in the late 1960s, the researchers were mainly interested in questions related to floods and forest management. Investigations of geomorphologi ...

2021

Explosive fragmentation of Prince Rupert's drops leads to well-defined fragment sizes

Jean-François Molinari

Anyone who has ever broken a dish or a glass knows that the resulting fragments range from roughly the size of the object all the way down to indiscernibly small pieces: typical fragment size distributions of broken brittle materials follow a power law, an ...

Nature Research2021

Edge influence on understorey plant communities depends on forest management

Matteo Tolosano

Questions Does the influence of forest edges on plant species richness and composition depend on forest management? Do forest specialists and generalists show contrasting patterns? ...

WILEY2020

Structural variation of forest edges across Europe

Matteo Tolosano

Forest edges are interfaces between forest interiors and adjacent land cover types. They are important elements in the landscape with almost 20% of the global forest area located within 100 m of the edge. Edges are structurally different from forest interi ...

ELSEVIER2020

Assessing the responses of Sphagnum micro-eukaryotes to climate changes using high throughput sequencing

Alexandre Buttler, Enrique Lara, Edward Mitchell, Mariusz Lamentowicz, Vincent Eric Jules Jassey

Current projections suggest that climate warming will be accompanied by more frequent and severe drought events. Peatlands store ca. one third of the world's soil organic carbon. Warming and drought may cause peatlands to become carbon sources through stim ...

PEERJ INC2020