Several researchers affiliated with the FORSAID project have participated in the compilation of the most recent edition of the Journal of Cultivated Plants. The second issue of the journal’s 77th volume zeroes in on forest conservation in the face of climate change. In that sense, protection measures ensuring forests’ resilience against climate-driven damage and decline are front and centre. Biotic stress factors such as pests are specifically singled out for their correlation to such environmental changes. 

Henrik Hartmann, member of both the Julius Kühn Institute and FORSAID’s Advisory Board, served in a coordinating capacity as the edition came together. He is therefore responsible for co-penning the issue’s editorial, an introduction to the history of forest protection and the main trends and challenges that will shape its future. The piece highlights the promise held by adaptive forest management as opposed to a merely preventive approach as climate change aftereffects become more pronounced in forests.

Hartmann is also a co-author of two of the issue’s scientific papers. For the first, he is joined by, among others, FORSAID’s coordinator Andrea Battisti (UNIPD), Eckehard G. Brockerhoff (WSL), Hervé Jactel (INRAE) and Jérôme Rousselet (INRAE). The topic of the paper is the exacerbating situation with regard to the pest-related invasions and epidemics triggered in forests by climate change. Its analysis concludes that only a comprehensive outlook incorporating the complex interactions between the variety of factors at play can reveal the full extent of the problem and uncover its possible solutions.

As for the second article, it represents a temporal analysis of plant protection products and their usage in a segment of Germany’s forests between 2015 and 2020. In this context, Hartmann and his co-authors explore the policies and management styles affecting the limited deployment of these products at a time when the benefits of their usage are increasingly being questioned.

You can access the full issue here. For the articles with contributions from FORSAID partners mentioned above, visit this section of our project library.