Today’s composition and structure of forests are often the results of management decisions taken decades or even centuries ago. The expected future climate, with increasing drought episodes and seasonally warm temperatures, is a challenge for forest management decisions since it will affect the growth, mortality and species composition of future forests. Climate change also influences forest productivity, e.g. wood production, wood property, fruit yield, etc. However, how the diverse species’ growth responds differently to long-term drought and high temperatures are poorly understood. Climate-growth relationships are an important tool to investigate the tree-, ground-cover- and herbaceous-growth responses under changing climatic conditions and thus provide a scientific basis for the selection of species and provenances for both future forests and urban greening.
We expect that this Research Topic can provide significant implications for understanding how climate change will influence the growth, distribution and productivity of forest plant species, which can be used as inputs to rural and urban forest management decisions regarding adaptation to an uncertain climatic future.
We welcome all article types using novel perspectives, theories, methods, tools, and modeling approaches to address these questions to understand forest plants’ growth in relation to environmental factors. The studied species can originate from temperate, boreal, subtropical and tropical ecosystems both in forests and in cities, to answer fundamental and applied questions ranging from the morphological, physiological and phenological mechanisms in plants to the effects of climate change on their growth and productivity.
We focus on the following topics of interest (the list is not exhaustive):
• The climate-growth relationships, and the morphological, physiological, phenological and ecological mechanisms behind these relationships
• Projecting tree growth and distribution responses into future climate
• The characteristics of plant functional traits, and their growth and development
• New and advanced experimental methods and research tools to understand how the diverse forest plants respond differently to climate change
• The mathematical secrets of plant morphology
• New analytical methods and research tools
Today’s composition and structure of forests are often the results of management decisions taken decades or even centuries ago. The expected future climate, with increasing drought episodes and seasonally warm temperatures, is a challenge for forest management decisions since it will affect the growth, mortality and species composition of future forests. Climate change also influences forest productivity, e.g. wood production, wood property, fruit yield, etc. However, how the diverse species’ growth responds differently to long-term drought and high temperatures are poorly understood. Climate-growth relationships are an important tool to investigate the tree-, ground-cover- and herbaceous-growth responses under changing climatic conditions and thus provide a scientific basis for the selection of species and provenances for both future forests and urban greening.
We expect that this Research Topic can provide significant implications for understanding how climate change will influence the growth, distribution and productivity of forest plant species, which can be used as inputs to rural and urban forest management decisions regarding adaptation to an uncertain climatic future.
We welcome all article types using novel perspectives, theories, methods, tools, and modeling approaches to address these questions to understand forest plants’ growth in relation to environmental factors. The studied species can originate from temperate, boreal, subtropical and tropical ecosystems both in forests and in cities, to answer fundamental and applied questions ranging from the morphological, physiological and phenological mechanisms in plants to the effects of climate change on their growth and productivity.
We focus on the following topics of interest (the list is not exhaustive):
• The climate-growth relationships, and the morphological, physiological, phenological and ecological mechanisms behind these relationships
• Projecting tree growth and distribution responses into future climate
• The characteristics of plant functional traits, and their growth and development
• New and advanced experimental methods and research tools to understand how the diverse forest plants respond differently to climate change
• The mathematical secrets of plant morphology
• New analytical methods and research tools
