Postdoctoral Project 2

Forests are among the world’s most important terrestrial ecological systems, considering the wide range of ecosystem functions, goods and services they provide for the environment and humanity. However, these ecological attributes of forests have been intensely disrupted in numerous regions worldwide under the pressure of climate change and anthropogenic activities. Climate change has become an increasingly apparent threat to these ecosystems, also in Romania, considering the recent changes in climatic conditions recorded in our country, which were confirmed by many specialized studies. Given the lack of interdisciplinary research in this respect, this study aims to conduct the first-ever analysis of the potential effects of climate change on forest productivity countrywide. The approach, based on the analysis of complex geospatial data, aims to test the hypothesis of climate change impact on forest productivity, an ecological feature that is essential to maintaining the forests’ health and ecosystem services. Therefore, the project will use various national data, classified as climatic (values of temperature, precipitation, evapotranspiration etc.) and satellite (Landsat images, from which representative ecometric data will be extracted for forest vegetation density, biomass and net primary productivity) data. The two categories of necessary data will be purchased for the 1987–2016 period and will be processed using complex geostatistical techniques (trends, linear regressions, bootstrapping etc.), which were selected so as to capture climate and ecological changes in Romania, as well as statistical causality relationships between climate and forest productivity over the past three decades. The results of this study will be useful primarily for the various governmental strategies focusing on protecting these terrestrial ecosystems, fighting climate change or mitigating the effects of climate change in Romania.