Publications by authors named "H Claessens"

With ongoing global warming, increasing water deficits promote physiological stress on forest ecosystems with negative impacts on tree growth, vitality, and survival. How individual tree species will react to increased drought stress is therefore a key research question to address for carbon accounting and the development of climate change mitigation strategies. Recent tree-ring studies have shown that trees at higher latitudes will benefit from warmer temperatures, yet this is likely highly species-dependent and less well-known for more temperate tree species.

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Article Synopsis
  • The future performance of European beech trees is uncertain due to their sensitivity to drought, and there is limited understanding of how climate change impacts their drought vulnerability across different regions.
  • The study uses a drought index to analyze how drought sensitivity of beech’s secondary growth varies over time, revealing that sensitivity is higher in dry environments and can be influenced by climatic conditions as well as tree competition within forests.
  • Results indicate that during severe droughts, beech growth may become less connected to climatic factors, suggesting a potential decline in drought tolerance and highlighting the complexity of the species' response to climate change.
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The mechanistic pathways connecting ocean-atmosphere variability and terrestrial productivity are well-established theoretically, but remain challenging to quantify empirically. Such quantification will greatly improve the assessment and prediction of changes in terrestrial carbon sequestration in response to dynamically induced climatic extremes. The jet stream latitude (JSL) over the North Atlantic-European domain provides a synthetic and robust physical framework that integrates climate variability not accounted for by atmospheric circulation patterns alone.

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Article Synopsis
  • The growth of beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) has been negatively impacted by climate variability, showing declines in recent decades across a large geographic range.* -
  • Models predict that by 2090, growth could decrease by 20% to over 50%, particularly in southern regions where drought conditions are expected to worsen due to climate change.* -
  • These anticipated declines in forest productivity pose significant ecological and economic risks, highlighting the urgent need for adaptive strategies in forest management.*
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Riparian buffers are of major concern for land and water resource managers despite their relatively low spatial coverage. In Europe, this concern has been acknowledged by different environmental directives which recommend multi-scale monitoring (from local to regional scales). Remote sensing methods could be a cost-effective alternative to field-based monitoring, to build replicable "wall-to-wall" monitoring strategies of large river networks and associated riparian buffers.

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