Regional Forest Responses to Environmental Change

International Union of Forest Research Organizations, Canopy Processes Working Group

A traveling workshop in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York, USA. October 6-13, 2006
Information: http://people.bu.edu/nathan/iufro_info.htm

Sponsors: Bartlett Experimental Forest, Black Rock Forest Consortium, Boston University, Harvard Forest, National Science Foundation, Northeastern Ecosystem Research Cooperative, University of New Hampshire, USDA Forest Service

Within forest ecosystems, forest canopies – defined as the upper layer of forests, including leaves and branches – play a central role in regulating exchanges of carbon, water, and energy between the land surface and atmosphere. Approaches and tools for measuring and translating information from canopy processes to the level of landscapes and regions lack consensus, coordination, and standardization, and hinder our understanding of how and why biogeographic regions show different responses to environmental change. Advances in modeling and monitoring of forest structure and function, including stable isotopes, remote sensing, ecohydrological monitoring, and environmental sensor networks, provide powerful new ways to link canopy processes to regional forest function. The goal of the meeting is to compare, contrast, and synthesize approaches and research findings to assess regional forest responses to environmental change, with a specific focus on emerging tools, methods and standards the international forest canopy science research community uses to measure, model, and translate forest ecosystem information across scales from as small as leaves up to entire landscapes and biomes.

More than 60 contributors to this workshop represent the countries of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Estonia, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.