2024 HALDANE PRIZE SHORTLIST: Julien Barrere discusses his paper “Forest storm resilience depends on the interplay between functional composition and climate—Insights from European-scale simulations“, which has been shortlisted for Functional Ecology’s 2024 Haldane Prize for Early Career Researchers:
👋 About the author
Having grown up in the most urban environment imaginable (the Paris suburbs), I have paradoxically always been attracted to nature and ecology. But it was probably during my six-month internship in the beautiful subtropical forest of the Soutpansberg Mountains in South Africa that I really fell in love with biology. I studied the dispersal of forest seeds by animals, which introduced me to the complex interactions between forest trees and their environment. I continued to work on plant-animal interactions during my PhD, where I investigated how cervids affect the regeneration of oak, a tree species of crucial ecological and economic importance in European temperate forests. After my PhD, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher on the factors that promote the resilience of European forests to a wider range of disturbances: herbivory, but also storms or fire.
🔎 About the shortlisted paper
In the paper shortlisted for this year’s Haldane Prize, I investigated how forest composition influences resilience to storms, the most important disturbance in Europe. The dynamics of forest resilience is a long process that can take dozens of years, well beyond the duration of most observational or experimental studies. For this reason, I used a modelling approach by simulating the resilience of forests that differ both in terms of climate (from Mediterranean to boreal) and in terms of diversity. The main findings were that:
- Tree diversity, both in terms of species and functions, significantly improves forest resilience. This means that forests with more tree species withstand storms better and recover more quickly. While this finding applies to the whole continent, this positive effect of diversity was stronger at the climatic edges of Europe (i.e. northern Scandinavia and southern Spain).
- The average functional strategy of tree species has an even greater effect on resilience than diversity. In short, forests dominated by slow growing species with dense wood are more resilient than forests dominated by productive species.
Right: Mixed forest in Southern Finland, including both conifer and broadleaf species. An example of forest potentially more resistant to storm disturbances.
(Credit : Julien Barrere)
🌳 What’s next?
This study focused on a strictly biological view of resilience, but the concept can also be extended to socio-economic aspects. Now employed as a permanent researcher at INRAE in the beautiful city of Aix-en-Provence, I am investigating forest resilience in terms of services provided to human society (e.g. carbon sequestration, timber production, recreational value), with a particular focus on Mediterranean forests. The main objective of my research is to help forest managers to make their forests more resilient in terms of ecosystem services in the context of climate change.
Read the full list of articles shortlisted for the 2024 Haldane Prize here.
