Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research

About: Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research is a facility organization based out in Birmensdorf, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Climate change & Soil water. The organization has 1256 authors who have published 3222 publications receiving 161639 citations. The organization is also known as: WSL.

State of the Climate in 2018

Abstract: El documento contiene la seccion c. Central America and the Caribbean del capitulo 7. Regional Climates

Linking Forest Fire Regimes and Climate—A Historical Analysis in a Dry Inner Alpine Valley

Abstract: Forest fire regimes are likely to experience considerable changes in the European Alps due to climatic changes. However, little is known about the recent regional fire history and the impact of local climate on the fire regime during the 20th century. We therefore reconstructed the fire history in a dry continental valley of the Swiss Alps (Valais) over the past 100 years based on documentary evidence, and investigated the relationship between the reconstructed fire regime and the local climatic variability. We compared the impact of temperature, precipitation, drought and dry foehn winds on fire frequency, extent of burnt area, and fire seasonality on various spatial and temporal scales. In the subalpine zone, the fire regime appears to have been mainly driven by temperature and precipitation, whereas these variables seem to have played only a secondary role in the colline-montane zones. Here, foehn winds and, probably, non-climatic factors seem to have been more important. Temperature and precipitation played a major role in shaping fire frequency and burnt area in the first half of the 20th century, but lost their importance during the second half. Our case study illustrates the occurrence of different fire regime patterns and their driving forces on small spatial scales (a few hundred square kilometers). We conclude that the strong rise in temperature over the past century has not profoundly changed the fire regime in Valais, but in the second half of the 20th century temperature was no longer a strong determinant for forest fires as compared to human activities or biomass availability in forests.

Carbon costs and benefits of Indonesian rainforest conversion to plantations

Abstract: Land-use intensification in the tropics plays an important role in meeting global demand for agricultural commodities but generates high environmental costs. Here, we synthesize the impacts of rainforest conversion to tree plantations of increasing management intensity on carbon stocks and dynamics. Rainforests in Sumatra converted to jungle rubber, rubber, and oil palm monocultures lost 116 Mg C ha−1, 159 Mg C ha−1, and 174 Mg C ha−1, respectively. Up to 21% of these carbon losses originated from belowground pools, where soil organic matter still decreases a decade after conversion. Oil palm cultivation leads to the highest carbon losses but it is the most efficient land use, providing the lowest ratio between ecosystem carbon storage loss or net primary production (NPP) decrease and yield. The imbalanced sharing of NPP between short-term human needs and maintenance of long-term ecosystem functions could compromise the ability of plantations to provide ecosystem services regulating climate, soil fertility, water, and nutrient cycles.

Tree-Ring Density Networks for Climate Reconstruction

Abstract: Conifers from regions with cool-moist summers (all mountains and the boreal conifer belt) are a suitable source of material for building a radiodensitometric tree-ring network in the northern hemisphere north of 40° latitude. Intra-annual densities from rings as small as 30 microns can be analysed using recently improved densitometric techniques. Networks of living conifers provide densitometric data that can be calibrated against instrumental temperatures and rigorous statistical comparisons clearly demonstrate that these data can be used to represent spatial patterns of temperature variability on annual and decadal timescales over, at least, the last 400 years. Continuous multimillennial chronologies of densitometric data are currently under construction in areas such as the Alps, northern Fennoscandia and Siberia (both the Yamal and Taimyr Peninsulas). Large numbers of logs and stumps that could provide material for the construction of many further high-quality multimillennial chronologies are known to exist in river sediments and lakes in the permafrost zone of northern Russia. Subfossil spruce in the boreal zone of northern North America are apparently rare. Relatively little densitometry has been undertaken in the southern hemisphere and what limited results have been produced seem to indicate that densitometric data offer little additional information, at least as regards temperature sensitivity, above that provided by more commonly analysed tree-ring width data.

Generic classification of the Verrucariaceae (Ascomycota) based on molecular and morphological evidence: recent progress and remaining challenges

Abstract: Recent molecular phylogenetic analyses and morphological Studies have shown that it is necessary to revise the present morphology-based generic delineation of the lichen family Verrucariaceae in or ...