Welcome!

This is the website of the Forest Ecology Lab at the Institute of Plant Sciences of the University of Bern.

The Forest Ecology Lab started their first steps in September 2024, founded by Rubén D. Manzanedo, Assistant Professor at UniBe.

The group studies how forest ecosystems respond to and are affected by environmental change acrosss temporal, spatial, and developmental scales. This remains one of the most pressing challenges in comprehending the effects of climate change on forests worldwide. We work across scales: from local to global, across ecosystems, and approaches. Repeated inventories, dendrochronological approaches, big open data, and citizen-science data are common tools that we use to try gaining unique perspectives and ecological insights that pushes the boundary of forest ecology.

We are a group of ecologists and foresters from a diversity of backgrounds and cultures, who celebrate and embrace diversity in all its forms.

Current projects of the group center in the use of big tree-ring data to assess long-term responses of forest to environmental change, assessing and improving long-term data quality for open databases globally, and investigating changes in environmental requirements across tree development.

PEOPLE:

Rubén D. Manzanedo (PI)
Rubén is currently Assisstant Professor at the Institute of Plant Sciences, in the University of Bern, Switzerland. Rubén is interested in how tree-ring ecosystems respond to changes in their environment across scales. Rubén did his BSc and MSc in Forestry and Global Change at the University of Córdoba in Spain, and his PhD in Tree Local Adaptation at the University of Bern. After doing postdocs in Harvard University, University of Washington and ETH-Zürich, Rubén currently leads the FEL group.

Zabdi López (PhD Student)
Zabdi is currently a PhD student a the University of Bern within the OpenRing project. Zabdi is interested in long-term open forest data, and tree responses to climate change across Europe. Zabdi did his MSc studies in Guatemala and Norway and joined the FEL group in November 2024.

Miriam Frutiger (Techinician)
Miriam is currently the group technical support, both in the field and at the lab. Miriam's interests include forest ecology, insect ecology, and art. She did her BSc at the University of Bern and has since joined in a wide range of projects and interests at the Institute of Plant Sciences.

Savannah Goetsch (MSc)
Savannah's MSc Thesis explores the regeneration niche of main Swiss tree species using repeated inventory data from Swiss NFI data, in collaboration with WSL.

Matteo Trachsel (BSc)
Matteo's BSc Thesis will look at patterns of heavy metal deposition within tree rings in Switzerland.

FORMER GROUP MEMBERS:
Giacomo Colasurdo (visiting student form the University of Milano) Giacomo's project centers on the analysis and collection of ecological metadata related to forest responses to climate change.

SOME CURRENTLY HIGHLIGHTED RESEARCH

These are some of the projects our group is working on at the moment. See past work down in the CV section

  • Big Long Term Ecological Data

    This ERC Starting project, now transfered to a SNSF Starting Grant aims to improve the representativity and availability of long term tree growth data across Europe.

    This project, started in September 2024 builds on our work harmonizing the largest dendrochronological databases and developing methods to proactively reduce its biases over time and improve our understanding of big ecological databases' strenght and limitations.

    More info here soon

    See the group's most recent publication in this topic: HERE

  • Regeneration Niche

    How do trees change their environmental requirements as they grow? What does it imply for forest responses to climate change?

    Check our work led by Kristiina Viskorpi, exploring the synergies and trade offs between adaptation to multiple extremes and their comparison between modelled and experimental tolerances to extremes across European tree species.

    Manzanedo et al. (In Review). This work, still being reviewed, systematically models the habitat of 42 species across 30 years of forest inventory data in Switzerland, to explore the generality of ontogenetic niche shifts.

  • Alpine Phenology

    How do the phenology of alpine flower communities respond to a warmer climate? How can that affect their provision of key ecosystem services, such as visitation experience to Protected Areas?

    Check our work using Citizen-Science data from Mount Rainier National Park

    More info on the long-term project MeadowWatch, led by Prof. Janneke Hille Ris Lambers

  • Forest Phenology and Climate Change

    How will early growing seasons influence forest responses to climate? Does the extended growing season compensate for the increase in temperature and aridity across global ecosystems?

    Check our work , led by Xianliang Zhang, which started this line of research in the group. We showed that rising temperatures promote boreal forest growth but that this is likely a temporal response, turning negative as permafrost further degrades.

    More recently, the work led by Wenqing Li, developed new methods to address increasing temperatures and shifting growing season in the highly-variable boreal systems, showing a much higher than expected sensitivity to drougth when this was accounted for.

    Currently, the Grephon team, led by Lizzie Wolkovich is working on a review paper aiming to organize and harmonize our undersanding of the relationship between earlier and longer growing seasons and tree growth.

HIGHLIGHTED GROUP PUBLICATIONS

In Review

- Manzanedo RD, Visakorpi K, Bieger A, Temperli C, Portier J, & Hille Ris Lambers J. Ontogenetic niche stability and contraction as a general rule for Swiss forest tree species.

- Wolkovich EM, Ettinger AK, Chin A, Chamberlain CJ, Baumgarten F, Pradhan K, Manzanedo RD, Hille Ris Lambers J. Why longer seasons with climate change may not increase tree growth.

- Zuidema A, the Tropical Tree-Ring Network (including Manzanedo RD). Pantropical tree growth resilience to drought.


2024

- Manzanedo RD, Chin AR, Ettinger A, Pederson N, Pradan K, Guiterman CCH, Su J, Baumgarten F, & Hille Ris Lambers J. Moving Ecological Tree-Ring Big Data Forwards: Limitations, Data Integration, and Multidisciplinarity.

- Su, J, Gou X, Hille Ris Lambers, J, Zhang DD, Zheng W, Xie M, & Manzanedo RD. 2024. Increasing ENSO variability synchronizes tree growth in subtropical forests. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 345: 109830.

- Visakorpi K, Manzanedo RD, Görlich A, Schiendorfer K, Altermatt Bieger AA, Gates E, Hille Ris Lambers J. 2023. Leaf-level resistance to frost, drought and heat covaries across European temperate tree seedlings. Journal of Ecology, 112: 559-574.

- Zhang X, Manzanedo RD, Xu G, & Lapenas AG. Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 13: Resilience and Adaptive Capacity of Temperate and Boreal Forests Under Climate Change. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 7: 1356686.

2023

- Zhang X, Rademacher T, Liu H, Wang L, & Manzanedo RD. 2023. Fading regulation of diurnal temperature ranges on drought-induced growth loss for drought-tolerant tree species. Nature Communications: 14, 6916.

- Li W, Manzanedo RD, Jian Y, Ma W, Du E, Zhao S, Rademacher T, Dong M, Xu H, Kang X, Wang J, Cui X, & Pederson N. 2023. Reassessment of growth-climate relations indicates the potential for decline across Eurasian boreal larch forests. Nature Communications: 14, 3358.

- Cao Z, Zhang J, Gou X, Wang Y, Sun Q, Yang J, Manzanedo RD, & Pederson N. 2023. Increasing forest carbon sinks in cold and arid northeastern Tibetan Plateau. Science of the Total Environment. 905: 167168.

FIND PREVIOUS WORK HERE


TEACHING

The group coordinated and tought the following courses at ETH-Zürich:

- Quantitative Approaches to Plant Population and Community Ecology (2021-now)

- Practicum in Unweltbiologie (Module on seed predation) (2021-now)

- Ecology and Evolution: Term Paper and Seminar

- Guest lectures at "Advanced Ecological Processes" (2022 and 2023) and "Plant Ecology" (2022)