TM15 | Presenting the new COST Action on the Joint effects of climate extremes and atmospheric deposition on European forests (CLEANFOREST)
Presenting the new COST Action on the Joint effects of climate extremes and atmospheric deposition on European forests (CLEANFOREST)
Convener: Rossella Guerrieri
Thu, 27 Apr, 19:00–20:00 (CEST)
 
Room 1.15/16
Thu, 19:00
Forests are at the forefront of our efforts to mitigate climate change and achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to ensure a sustainable life on Earth. However, forest ecosystems are particularly threatened by global change components, such as more frequent climate extreme events and changes in atmospheric pollutants (namely carbon dioxide, reactive nitrogen and sulphur compounds). All these factors strongly influence the capacity of forests to continue providing important ecosystem services we rely on, including climate regulation and mitigation, biodiversity conservation, clean water and air supply, food and energy production, and improvement of human health and well-being, particularly in urban systems. Different global change drivers could play a synergistic, antagonistic or predisposing role in affecting forest ecosystem functioning and health. All these drivers, however, are generally considered in isolation, and their effects on key processes (at tree, soil and ecos ystem levels) are investigated separately in natural, periurban and urban forests, thus leading to uneven, un-coordinated and scattered information among different research communities.

The recently funded COST Action CLEANFOREST has the ambition to overcome such fragmentation by capitalising on existing expertise and infrastructures available at the pan-European level (monitoring and manipulation experiments) to i) coordinate efforts and ii) foster exchange of information and collaborations among different research communities and relevant stakeholders along the natural-periurban-urban forests continuum. This will promote and ensure that robust methods addressing issues of forests under global change are adopted at large scale, and that policies are underpinned by robust science.

This Townhall meeting will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the CLEANFOREST COST Action, Challenges and WG activities planned for the next 4 years, networking and training opportunities, particularly for early career researchers. The meeting seeks to engage with the broader scientific community within the EGU Atmospheric Science, Biogoesciences, Geosciences Instrumentation and Data Systems and Soil System Sciences Divisions so to widen participation to other research fields/expertise. We welcome to the discussion researchers at any stage of the their careers involved in monitoring and/or manipulation experiments as well as in bridging science and policy to address societal challenges. The meeting will open with a short and dynamic presentation of the COST Action (Challenges, Structure and activity plans), followed by an open and engaging discussion with the attendees.

Speakers: Chair of the Action (Rossella Guerrieri, University of Bologna, Italy), Science communication Coordinator (Katerina Machacova, CzechGlobe - Global Change Research Institute Czech, Czech Republic) and WG leaders and/or co-leaders (TBD).

Visit the COST Action website: https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA21138/

Speakers

  • Ivika Ostonen, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Katerina Machacova, Global Change Research Institute CAS, Czechia
  • Richard Nair, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
  • Mana Gharun, University of Münster, Germany
  • Thomas Pugh, Lund University, Sweden
  • Sami Ullah, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom