Forests and Human Life

Besides wood products (timber) the local forests of NE-Germany as elsewhere in the world provide many more services to human society. They carry a big recreative value especially for the tourist sector, provide clean groundwater, have positive, mediating effects on the local climate and protect against erosion or windstorms.

In order to maintain the functioning of the local forests under the threat of global (climate) change an adaptive forest management including for example the conversion of pine monocultures into mixed forests becomes necessary. In close collaboration with the local forest management authorities we provide a scientific basis for future management measures aiming towards stable and adapted forests.

-The past is the key to the future-  In projects like the recently completed “FARseeiNG” (Forest Adaptation and Restoration in NE-Germany) or “ICLEA” (Virtual Institute for Integrated Climate and Landscape Evolution Analyses) we try to disentangle the climatic influences on tree growth from those of human management or other disturbances. Dendroclimatology provides insight in past climate-tree growth relationships and in combination with local climate models allows for predictions of growth scenarios under future climate conditions for the most important forest tree species