Upscaling forest floor properties: identifying drivers and assessing temporal changes on a regional scale

Forest floor (FF) properties, such as thickness, mass and morphology, are critical indicators of forest ecosystem dynamics, shaped by climatic conditions, nutrient deposition and tree species composition. Despite their ecological importance, systematic assessments of the drivers and temporal changes in FF properties across spatial scales remain limited. This knowledge gap hinders the ability to extrapolate site-specific findings to broader regions, crucial for understanding and managing forests under changing environmental conditions.

We focus on identifying the drivers of FF properties and examining how these properties have changed over time at local and regional scales. Using data from inventories, such as the NFI (National Forest Inventory) 3 & 4 and the NFSI (National Forest Soil Inventory) 2 & 3, we investigate relationships between FF properties and key environmental factors, including climate variables, nutrient availability and forest management. This will involve examining spatial patterns and temporal trends in FF properties and understanding how drivers such as climate, nitrogen deposition and shifts in tree species composition influence these patterns. By leveraging statistical and geospatial modeling approaches, the project aims to refine methods for transferring plot-level data to broader scales, ensuring reliable representation of FF variability and trends. The inventory-based results on the factors influencing FF are compared with the process-oriented investigations at the study sites of the Forest Floor project (DFG FOR 5315) in order to be able to interpret the correlations found in the inventory data.

The outcomes of this research will provide crucial insights into how FF properties respond to environmental and management changes, contributing to improved forest monitoring and sustainable management strategies. By bridging the gap between localized observations and large-scale assessments, this work supports national and international efforts to evaluate FF in the context of climate change and other impacts.