Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit abstracts to our technical session for the IUFRO Congress in Stockholm, 2024.

The title is “Global forests in a hotter and drier world: Assessing forest damage and tree mortality from climate change-accelerated insect outbreaks and infectious diseases”.

This session is a joint effort between the IUFRO Task Force on Monitoring Global Tree Mortality Patterns and Trends and Working Group 07.03.06: Integrated Management of Forest Defoliating Insects of Division 7.00.00 – Forest Health.

The session includes 15-minute talks, 5-minute flash talks, posters and a panel discussion. Submissions are now open. Session speakers will be selected by the organizing committee as well as the session organizers.

Here is a link to the meeting and submission details and description:

https://iufro2024.com/iufro-world-congress-2024/aim-and-scope/

https://iufro2024.com/call-for-congress-abstract

Technical Session: Global forests in a hotter and drier world: Assessing forest damage and tree mortality from climate change-accelerated insect outbreaks and infectious diseases”.

Global forest ecosystems are facing unprecedented climate conditions in many parts of the world. Over the last 50 years, observations are accumulating of increasing forest decline and tree mortality following hotter droughts, often caused and accelerated by biotic interactions with damaging insects and infectious diseases. The globalized trade market exacerbates this phenomenon by the displacement of biotic agents across natural barriers to naïve and thus highly vulnerable forest ecosystems. Given the importance that forests play for maintaining global biogeochemical cycles, human livelihood and welfare, and for providing essential ecosystem services, a thorough understanding of current and future states of global forests is badly needed for forest managements planning and, at a higher level, for policy decision making. Current assessments of forest damage and decline as well as rates of tree mortality are often of low spatial and temporal resolution and are not available for many regions across the globe, in particular the large forest regions of the Eurasian boreal forest and the tropical forests of South America and Africa.

This session seeks to initiate a joint effort across scientific disciplines and administrative agencies concerned with forest damage assessments. The goal is to stimulate collaborations across regional and national boundaries with the aim to initiate an international (subcontinental to global) spatially-explicit database on forest damage. We welcome contributions from ground-based assessments of forest condition (e.g., national forest inventories) as well as from international initiatives for monitoring tree mortality and forest insects and diseases. Furthermore, we encourage submissions presenting new methodologies for detection and monitoring of biotic forest disturbances, in particular remote sensing approaches, as well as GIS-driven analytical assessments of forest insect and disease epidemiological dynamics.

We look forward to receiving your submissions to this session.

Best regards,

Deepa Pureswaran (defoliator working group) and Henrik Hartmann (tree mortality task force)

Deepa Pureswaran, PhD

Research Scientist,  Forest Insect Ecology

Natural Resources Canada

Canadian Forest Service, Atlantic Forestry Centre

Scientifique, Écologie des insectes forestiers

Ressources naturelles Canada

Service canadien des forêts, Centre de foresterie de l’Atlantique

1350, Regent Street

Fredericton, NB E3C 2G6

Canada

Websites:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Deepa_Pureswaran/research

http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/employees/read/dpureswa