The conversion of Norway spruce stands into mixed-species forests is currently one of the most pressing challenges to ensure the stability of forest ecosystems in Central Europe. Recently, direct seeding as a method of artificial regeneration and species (re-)introduction has received increased attention…
Abstract Background and Aims Forest floor vegetation can both respond to and affect the water and nitrogen (N) availability in forest ecosystems. However, their role for influencing the relationship between throughfall and N fluxes has hardly been studied, leaving a knowledge gap in our mechanistic understanding…
Charcoal production, closely linked to ore smelting, flourished in the Thuringian Forest (central Germany) between the 16th and 19th centuries. Relict charcoal hearths (RCHs) provide a soil archive of these past activities and are common in European forested uplands. The mapped density of RCHs at Großer…
Soil scarification, which involves the disruption of the top layer of soil, is a common method utilized to promote the regeneration of tree species on clear-cut and calamity areas. In the context of adapting forests to become climate-resilient mixed species forests, this method could also be used to…
Abstract One of silviculture's primary objectives is converting monospecific into diverse forest stands comprising climate-tolerant species, aiming to mitigate global change. In practice, this is often achieved by enrichment planting or seeding of species, currently not occurring in the specific area.…
One of silviculture's primary objectives is converting monospecific into diverse forest stands comprising climate-tolerant species, aiming to mitigate global change. In practice, this is often achieved by enrichment planting or seeding of species, currently not occurring in the specific area. Silver…
Soil respiration is rarely studied at the landscape scale where forest and soil properties can be important drivers. We performed forest and soil inventories in 150 temperate forest sites in three German landscapes and measured in situ soil CO 2 efflux with the soda-lime method in early summer 2018 and…
Canopies shape net precipitation patterns, which are spatially heterogeneous and control soil moisture response to rainfall. The vast majority of studies on canopy water fluxes were conducted in forests. In contrast, grassland canopies are often assumed to be spatially homogeneous, therefore likely not…
Soil respiration is an important pathway of soil organic carbon losses in temperate grasslands; however, it is rarely studied across broad management intensity gradients in a landscape. Using the soda-lime method, we measured in-situ soil CO 2 efflux with single measurements of long exposure time (i.e.…
Purpose: The woolly beech aphid thrives on European beech leaves, which has complex direct and indirect impacts on above- and belowground processes. A mechanistic understanding of insect-mediated changes in organic carbon (OC) availability for microbial life and its implications for element cycling is…
Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022-02-02
Land-use and management influence the coupled carbon and nutrients cycles in soils. However, studies that investigate carbon and nutrient cycling in multiple land-uses over multiple study regions with distinct environmental conditions and across broad management gradients are scarce. Therefore, many…
In stemflow, rainfall is collected and channeled to a concentrated soil water input. It can constitute up to 30% of incident precipitation in some ecosystems. However, the size of the zone influenced by stemflow is unclear, and statistically representative measurement of stemflow (on and in between sites)…
High N depositions of past decades brought changes to European forests including impacts on forest soil nutrition status. However, the ecosystem responses to declining atmospheric N inputs or moderate N depositions attracted only less attention so far. Our study investigated macronutrient (N, S, Ca2+,…
Abstract As a cause of ecosystem disturbances, phytophagous insects are known to directly influence the element and organic matter (OM) cycling in ecosystems by their defoliation and excretion activity. This study focuses on the interplay between short‐term, insect herbivory, plant responses to feeding…
Canopy and tree morphology are assumed to play a significant role in modulating the amount of rainfall water during its routing throughout the vegetation and the near‐surface Critical Zone. One crucial point of research addresses the spatial extent of stemflow (SF) infiltration, because its concentration…
Carbon (C) turnover has been increasingly shown to be linked to the mineralization of other nutrients due to the co-limitation of these elements on microbial processes. Regional factors such as climate and parent materials, land use and management practices are important controls of soil nutrient and…
With a projected world population of about nine billion people in 2050 and the increasing threat of global climate change, agriculture will be forced to develop management strategies that will ensure food security and increase the soil's ability to store CO2. The fertility of a soil depends heavily on…
This thesis is part of a new large-scale and long-term project for functional biodiversity, called the Biodiversity Exploratories, which includes a hierarchical set of standardized field plots in three different regions of Germany (Schorfheide Chorin, Hainich Dün, Schwäbische Alb) encompassing various…