ECOSENSE - SFB 1537

Global climate change threatens ecosystem functioning  worldwide. Forest ecosystems are particularly important for carbon sequestration. However, recurrent stresses, such as heat waves, floods, and droughts, increasingly endanger even central European forests, with potentially cascading effects on their carbon sink capacity, drought resilience, and sustainability. Knowledge on the impact on the multitude of processes driving soil-plant-atmosphere interactions within these complex systems is widely lacking and uncertainty about future changes extremely high.

Our interdisciplinary research project ECOSENSE will investigate all relevant scales in a next generation ecosystem research assessment. Our vision is to detect and forecast critical changes in ecosystem functioning based on the understanding of hierarchical process interaction. To do so ECOSENSE will develop, implement, and test a new versatile, distributed, cost-effective, autonomous, intelligent sensor network based on novel microsensors tailored to the specific needs in remote and harsh forest environments.

Our novel ECOSENSE Toolkit, tested and validated in controlled climate extreme experiments, and our ECOSENSE Forest, will open new horizons for rapid assessment in vast and remote ecosystems.