Format: ORAL

Guerrieri Rossella1, Vanguelova Elena2, Munzi Silvana3

1 Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy 2 Forest Research, Farnham, UK 3 Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Forests are at the forefront of our efforts to mitigate climate change and achieve the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, to ensure a sustainable life on Earth. However, forest ecosystems are particularly threatened by global change components, such as increasing frequency and severity of climate extreme events, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and pollutants concentrations. Different global change drivers could play a synergistic, antagonistic or predisposing role in affecting forest ecosystem functioning and health. All these drivers, however, are generally considered in isolation, and their effects on key processes (at tree, soil and ecosystem levels) are investigated separately in natural, periurban and urban forests, thus leading to uneven, un-coordinated and scattered information among different research communities. CLEANFOREST is establishing an inclusive and multidisciplinary pan-European network, which capitalizes on existing expertise and infrastructures (monitoring networks, manipulation experiments) to i) coordinate research efforts (e.g. data collection), ii) compare approaches and define common protocols to standardize measurements and methods used in global change studies, and iii) foster collaboration among different research groups to exchange and synthesize data, thus contributing to advancing scientific knowledge, identifying research gaps and providing suggestions for the next generation manipulation experiments and monitoring networks. This includes summarizing main results on the effects of treatments applied (experiments) or observed deposition level (monitoring) on eco-physiological parameters, health, growth and diversity of forests, assessing the effects of atmospheric deposition and climate extremes on trees nitrogen storage and cycling, and evaluating the role of aboveground biodiversity (tree diversity and identity) response to N depositions and climate extremes, as potential mitigation measures. This article/publication is based upon work from CLEANFOREST COST Action CA21138, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).