written by Caroline Greiser
In February 2020, a group of forest microclimate enthusiasts from all over the world met for a 3 days workshop in Ekenäs, south of Stockholm. Our PI, Kristoffer, and Pieter De Frenne from Ghent University brought us together to discuss where we are in forest microclimate research and to start new collaborations. Now we can proudly present the first outcome: a just-published review about forest microclimates in a global change context. Personally, I was amazed by two things. First, the writing and publishing seemed to work very smooth, undoubtly due to the excellent process leading by Pieter and Kristoffer. And second, the author group includes quite a number of early-career researchers, ECRs, including Ditte, Irena and me from our lab. I learned a lot from this collaborative paper by watching, reading, writing, commenting, editing and revising. The most fun part for me was making the figures, as I strongly believe in visual science communication. This paper was the perfect playground as many other authors (high proportion of ECRs in the figure team!) shared similar motivations to make it a visually memorizable paper. We hope to get the message through, that forest microclimates can be important buffers for a climate-change threatened biodiversity and therefore urgently need our consideration.
Full publication:
De Frenne et al. (2021) Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agenda. Global Change Biology
More extensive blog from co-author Jonas Lembrechts