EkSkog

This site is based on several studies aimed at evaluating the growth, health, and mortality patterns of oak (Quercus robur) in the southern Sweden, primarily with the help of dendrochronological methods.

Presently, oak forests are receiving increasing attention from a range of scientific and societal perspectives. Studies in biodiversity-related topics revealed oaks stands as extremely valuable components of southern Swedish landscape, providing regeneration and habitat opportunities for a wide range of plant and animal species, many of which are endangered. Within the forest industry, there is the growing interest in increasing the long-term sustainability of wood production through, beside other steps, investing in the processing of hardwood timber.

Both the insights from these studies and the trend within the industry are coupled with limited data available about the factors controlling the status of oak stands. This knowledge gap became apparent as the evidence of regional decline in the status of hardwood stands started accumulating since late 80es and attempts were made to interpret this phenomenon.

Recently conducted extensive inventories of the status of hardwood stands show a decline in the health of mature oak trees stands over the area of Skåne, Blekinge and Halland. The trend has been observed since 1988 and no clear spatial pattern of the phenomenon emerged. Although there is a general agreement about complex nature of oak stands’ decline, the latter most likely being a manifestation of physiological stress of the trees, the identification of primary factors behind the current trend is still under way.

The main aim of this project is to quantify environmental influences on oak growth by using tree-ring chronologies and analyze the spatial and temporal patterns of vitality decline in oak in Southern Sweden.

Two major hypotheses have been formulated and tested within this project:

• oak growth and crown vitality correlate with each other, which provides possibilities for retrospective analysis of crown conditions;
   

• decline in crown conditions varies among sites, depending on site properties and stand age.

Additionally it was of interest to find out

• the main monthly weather variables controlling the growth of oak,
   
• climatic conditions associated with the wide-spread negative and positive growth anomalies, 
   
• temporal pattern of oak mortality, and
   
• weather parameters driving dynamics of annual increment in southern Swedish oak

The project also aims at parametarizing a bioclimatic growth model for the Swedish oaks.

This project was primarily supported by Stiftelsen Oscar och Lili Lamms Minne and Carl Tryggers Stiftelse för Vetenskaplig Forskning as project grant and post-doc fellowship to Igor Drobyshev.

Support was also received from

Region Skåne Miljöfond (The Environmental Fund of Scania Region)

Godsförvaltaren vid Näsbyholm Stig Anderssons fond, Alharp

SUFOR Project (Sustainable forestry in Southern Sweden),  and

Carl-Fredrik von Horns fond, KSLA

EkSkog.org News

2012-01

2009-03

Master project announcement