The ECOSENSE Forest is located in the municipal forest of the city of Ettenheim, approximately 45 minutes’ drive north of Freiburg and easily accessible by forest roads. The forest is nested in the hilly transition between the upper Rhine Valley and the Black Forest providing a mixed forest system, dominated by beech with patches of spruce, oak, fir, Douglas fir and pine trees of different ages in mixed and pure patches. The Ettenheim forest site is a managed forest, with a low-impact sustainable management strategy.
Three stands were selected for the first phase of ECOSENSE with pure beech, mixed beech-Douglas fir and pure Douglas fir trees, suitable for investigating the hypotheses on spatio-temporal heterogeneity. The orographic location of the forest on an extensive plateau was selected to fulfil the requirements for an eddy covariance (EC) tower and two canopy access towers. The requirements for EC measurements are met with relatively flat or uniformly sloped terrain (< 5°). The forest provides similar roughness in the fetch of the prevailing wind directions up to 1-1.5 km. In addition, there are many forest patches on the same plateau with different composition and ages that can be used in the next phases of the project.