Newsletter
Important Information: Changes in your contact information or affiliation
Please help us to keep our member list up-to-date, so you don’t miss out on any future events and mortality-related news!
Simply send us an email, if your affiliation or email address changes.
Highlight: The Global Tree Mortality Database
In a recent paper by Hammond et al. in Nature Communications, the authors precisely geo-referenced field-based observations of tree mortality associated with hotter-drought, revealing a “hotter-drought fingerprint” for Earth’s observed forest mortality. The initial database includes 1,303 tree mortality plots across all forested continents, with observations dating back to 1970, and is available as footing for the Global Tree Mortality Database through the ITMN website. Here, we encourage the tree mortality community—including researchers, foresters, and citizen scientists—to contribute additional historical (and future) observations of tree mortality via this interactive database application.
Figure: The interactive Global Tree Mortality Database, showing the “map” panel. Within the application, users can search for and download data, explore observations on an interactive map (clicking points links to source material), and even submit additional observations of tree mortality to the database.
The IUFRO Forest Health 2022 Conference in Lisbon
We would like to invite you to join us for the 2022 Forest Health Conference in Lisbon, 6-9 September. The meeting is open to all researchers working on aspects related to tree health, forest health, forest pathology and forest entomology. Overview of session topics.
We welcome contributions, addressing tree mortality in particular, to the following session: Worldwide trends in tree mortality: The roles of climate change, insects and pathogens and their interaction. In this interdisciplinary session organised jointly by the IUFRO Task Force on Monitoring Global Tree Mortality and the IUFRO Division 7 we aim to facilitate exchange within the diverse community of people working on the impacts of climate extremes on trees and forests, interactions between trees and insects or disease under stress, and their impacts on forest ecosystems from changes in disturbance regimes to tree mortality and forest decline. We are looking forward to seeing you in Lisbon in September 2022!
View the latest videos of our seminar series on YouTube!
If you’ve missed a talk in the ITMN seminar series or want to re-watch an interesting contribution, you can do so on our YouTube Channel. We regularly update it, so check it out for the latest seminars you might have missed.
Tree mortality ECR highlights
In this section we highlight Early Career Scientists that engage in relevant and highly interesting research projects related to tree mortality. We are honoured to present
Dr. Amy Bennett!
Dr. Amy Bennett is an ecologist and postdoc studying tropical forest responses to climate change at the University of Leeds, UK. Dr. Bennett completed her PhD in 2020, finding that African tropical forests were surprisingly resistant to the record high temperatures of the 2015-2016 El Niño event, with no significant increases in carbon losses from tree mortality. Her previous work uncovered that larger trees have more pronounced drought sensitivity, with lower growth rates and higher mortality during drought. She is interested in the factors determining where and how the forests of the future will persist.
Follow Amy on Twitter to know more about tropical forest climate sensitivity.
If you are an early career scientist and would like us to promote your work or would like to suggest someone for this category, please contact us.
Thank you for your support & please contact us with questions, ideas and suggestions.
Your ITMN organisation team
Henrik, Adriane, Tom, Nadine, Bernhard, Rupert & Cornelius