Future Forests Seminars

Location and time: Schänzlestraße 1, small lecture hall (Kleiner Hörsaal); 15:30 – 16:30

Abstract: Forests established today will develop under climatic and biological conditions that differ from those of the past. Climate change alters tree vitality and disturbance regimes while also affecting the distribution, establishment and impacts of pests and pathogens. At the same time, global trade and movement of plant material create new opportunities for species introductions and novel host–pest interactions. This presentation explores how forest health can be strengthened under such uncertainty, moving from resistance of individual trees to resilience at stand and landscape levels. I will discuss the roles of diversity, forest structure, tree-species choice and management in spreading risk, while considering the potential benefits and uncertainties associated with new tree species. Finally, I present how surveillance and early detection can support a more anticipatory approach to forest health. Rather than attempting to predict the future precisely, resilient forestry may depend on maintaining options for responding to the unexpected.

Speaker: Johanna Witzell is Professor of Forest Health at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her research focuses on forest health and resilience under environmental change, with particular interests in tree–pathogen interactions, invasive pests and pathogens, forest regeneration, biosecurity, and climate-related risks. Her work combines ecological and molecular approaches with emerging technologies for forest monitoring and early detection. She teaches and supervises students at BSc, MSc and PhD levels, and is involved in several national and European projects. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research and currently serves as Section Editor for Forest Pathology at Current Forestry Reports.

Location and time: Schänzlestraße 1, small lecture hall (Kleiner Hörsaal); 15:30 – 16:30

Abstract: Forests provide many ecosystem services, for example by storing half of the world’s terres-trial carbon, providing two thirds of the western United States water supply, and creating habitat for culturally and ecologically important resources such as Vaccinium spp. However, legacies of intensive forest management coupled with shifting baselines of climate and fire are threatening forest ecosystems and the human communities that live in or near the forest-ed wildland urban interface. In this talk, I will present case studies from the western United States highlighting how forest treatments affect subsequent wildfire in high biomass forests, how spatially contrasting management strategies affect trade-offs between fire risk and eco-system services, and how science co-production can support future forest management under shifting baselines. My work highlights how multiple approaches including remote sensing and forest ecological modeling, combined with collaborative partnerships with federal, state, and Tribal agencies, can facilitate planning for future forest social-ecological resilience.

Speaker: Dr. Kristin Braziunas focuses on understanding forest and disturbance dynamics in the face of climate change, with an emphasis on mountain landscapes in the western United States and European Alps. Prior to her current position at the University of Washington, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group at the Technical University of Munich, and she completed her PhD (2021) and MS (2018) in Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously worked for eight years in sustainability planning and as a Firefighter/Lieutenant for a municipal fire department.

Location and time: Schänzlestraße 1, small lecture hall (Kleiner Hörsaal); 15:30 – 16:30

Abstract: In Europe, centuries of management make natural forest dynamics hard to study: recovery from management outlasts most research projects and demands consistency in inventory methods, data storage, and infrastructure. In Switzerland, forest reserves representing the main national forest types have been inventoried since the 1950s and resurveyed decadally under a standardised protocol. This work is extended to the primeval beech forests in the Ukrainian Carpathians. Both research infra-structures contribute to the European Forest Reserves Initiative (EuFoRIa), which assembles long-term plot data from strict reserves across Europe and joins expertise , and knowledge to facilitate studies on the development of unmanaged forests.

We have used these data sets to observe and model biomass accumulation after management ceased, long-term trends in background tree mortality, and the role of structural heterogeneity and deadwood in habitat provision. They also expose the methodological prerequisites on which such comparisons are based inventory design, reconciliation of heterogeneous historical records, estimation of change from repeated measurements. My talk will combine these different approaches and provide some in-sight in which the next decades of monitoring should go to help leverage our understanding of cli-mate change impacts on forest ecosystems.

Speaker: I work in the Stand Dynamics and Silviculture group at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL in Birmensdorf. My research addresses how forests develop in the ab-sence of management: the spatial structure of unmanaged stands, trajectories of biomass and basal area over long timescales, patterns of tree regeneration and background mortality, and the accumula-tion of deadwood and structural heterogeneity that underpins forest biodiversity. I draw on long-term inventory data from Swiss forest reserves, the primeval beech forest of Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh in Western Ukraine, and the European Forest Reserves Initiative (EuFoRIa) from strict forest reserves across Europe.

Location and time: Schänzlestraße 1, small lecture hall (Kleiner Hörsaal); 15:30 – 16:30

Abstract: Heatwaves are often defined by meteorological thresholds alone. This talk explores how it can be redefined through societal impacts and responses. The speaker will reflect on this through their own recent research. Beginning with a method for deriving impact-based heatwave durations, the talk examines how risk evolves over time and how measurable shifts in societal attention and behaviour shape heat-related health outcomes. These approaches treat risk as the outcome of interacting climate and societal processes, a perspective central to social-ecological systems research. The talk closes with a discussion of how such risk assessment might inform robust adaptation decision making in other heat- and hazard-exposed societally relevant systems.

Speaker: Kelley De Polt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. She earned her PhD as an external candidate at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with a thesis that advanced the modelling of risk dynamics in multi-hazard heatwaves, including societal responses and public health impacts. Her postdoctoral work bridges climate and socio-environmental systems, focusing on early warning system development and implementation. She holds a BS in Meteorology and an MS in Geography, chaired the MYRIAD-EU Early Career Research Board, and co-leads the RiskKAN working group on AI for Complex Climate Risk Mitigation.

Location and time: Schänzlestraße 1, small lecture hall (Kleiner Hörsaal); 15:30 – 16:30

Topic: Climate change has hit Central European forests hard, causing. severe declines in tree health and increasing disturbances from biotic stressors, like damaging insects. Together, this has produced large-scale forest die-off in many European regions and the anticipated climate trajectories make further loss of tree health and forest decline very likely.
From an ecological perspective, observed forest decline is a logical first step towards adaptation, but the rate of climate warming is too fast for a gradual transition into new stable states, which anyhow can only be achieved when climate stabilizes. Any attempt to actively strengthen forest resilience via management must embrace the underlying uncertainties and allow flexible adjustment as new climates evolve. Forest science may better address these challenges by combining forces and bundling expertise. This presentation does not present solutions, but seeks to foster a collaborative and interdisciplinary spirit for the challenges ahead.

Speaker: Henrik lived in Canada for almost 20 years where he studied forest sciences at the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, and did a PhD at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Back to Germany, he worked as a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, before becoming director of the Julius Kuehn-Institute for Forest Protection. Henrik is an experimental tree ecophysiologist investigating tree and forest responses to climate change, with a strong focus on interactions between trees and biotic stressors like damaging insects.

Location: Stefan-Meier-Str. 76, Room 708

Topic: The presentation will give a short overview of activities and initiatives from her team, including:

1. connecting researchers with relevant network partners
2. creating incentives for collaboration
3. capacity building
4. strengthening framework conditions for transdisciplinary research
5. innovation support (e.g. innovation labs)

These will be illustrated with concrete examples such as support within specific calls, seed funding for proposals, networking events, etc. Beyond that, the presentation will also touch on additional (potentially interesting) initiatives emerging from the EU Missions project.

Speaker: Luise Scheiber is part of the team for Knowledge Exchange, Technology Transfer and National Funding at the University of Vienna. She works as part of a project aimed at strengthening the role of universities in the national implementation of the EU Missions in Austria.

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: Forests cover approximately 31 % of the Earth’s surface and have a fundamental role in global carbon, water, and energy cycles. However, these cycles are increasingly impacted by excess tree mortality rates driven by climate extremes and pest outbreaks. Forecasting where and when trees will die is critical for proactive forest management. Machine learning approaches offer a promising way to forecast tree mortality patterns by leveraging large-scale environmental covariates and auxiliary data. In this talk I will show previous work from my Master’s thesis on developing a deep learning framework to predict annual fractional deadwood cover (FDC) and briefly introduce how this work will be continued in my PhD project within the Cluster. 

Speaker: Mattis Pfenning completed both his BSc and MSc in Environmental Sciences at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, specialising in Environmental Modelling and Data Science. Alongside his Master’s studies, he worked as a Hiwi at the Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics, where he also wrote his thesis on forecasting tree mortality using deep learning. He has recently started a PhD at Future Forests, focusing on the attribution of large-scale tree mortality

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: High-resolution scenarios are required to capture hydro-climatic conditions and extreme events. This project closes a critical data gap at stand and plot level by providing long-term, bias-corrected time series linked to forest-relevant processes. It strengthens the basis for understanding water balance, tree growth, and carbon fluxes under climate change and supports modelling, adaptation strategies, and transformation pathways.

Speaker: Christopher Jung completed a B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences from 2009 to 2012 at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. From 2012 to 2015 he graduated in the “M.Sc. Environmental Sciences ” in Freiburg. He was a doctoral research assistant at the Chair of Environmental Meteorology and now works as a postdoctoral researcher for Future Forests. He graduated in February 2018. His research interest is in small-scale modeling of statistical properties of the near-surface airflow. The main objectives of his research are optimisation approaches for wind energy potential assessments and the reduction of windstorm risk in forests.

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: Daniel Braga will present the work of the Amazonian Institute of Family Farming and the School of Rural Development at the Federal University of Pará on family farms adopting agroforestry practices for sustainable territorial development.

Speaker: Daniel Palma Perez Braga holds a doctor in Forest Sciences with a focus on Ecosystem Conservation from the University of São Paulo (ESALQ/USP). He is Professor at the School of Rural Development (Ineaf) at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) in Belém. He is dedicated to issues related to family farming in the Amazon, sustainable livelihoods, and cacao agroforestry systems. He currently coordinates the Training Program in Technical Assistance and Rural Extension for Agrarian Reform Settlements (Pro-SEMEIA).

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: RESA is an initiative aimed at supporting a strong, influential, and lasting Amazonian scientific community that can define and advance towards a sustainable economy of the Amazon Region. The purpose is to foster applied research led by researchers and experts who live and work in the Legal Amazon – the assumption is that the most accurate understanding of what truly works for the forests, cities, rivers and communities of the Amazon comes from the people who live and experience this reality daily. However, these specialists face significant challenges, such as limited funding for their research, little influence in defining agendas and funding priorities, and restricted access to decision-making processes. In this workshop, we will share details of this initiative, how we are working to overcome those challenges and explore opportunities for cooperation.

Speaker: Pedro Zanetti is a Bioeconomy Specialist. Forest Engineer and Master in Sustainable Development practices from UFRuralRJ, with a one-year exchange at Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands). Over the past 10 years, he has managed projects related to conservation, sustainable management and production, and responsible sourcing of agricultural and forest commodities. He served as Senior Program Manager at the British Embassy, leading the UK-Brazil green and inclusive growth sustainable agriculture portfolio. With GIZ, he coordinated three bioeconomy projects focused on sustainable cacao value chains and agroforestry systems in the Atlantic Forest and Amazon. At ICS, he is a Specialist in Land Use Transition, Food Systems, and Bioeconomy.

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: The Future Forests cluster of excellence requires representative case‑study sites that integrate long‑term datasets, existing infrastructure, and key environmental gradients (e.g., protection status, management, ownership, topography, forest structure, climate). We present a novel, data‑driven framework for selecting such sites and placing microclimate stations across the heterogeneous forested landscapes of the Black Forest and Rhine Valley. The workflow combines environmental layers, extracts dominant landscape patterns, and applies a hierarchical selection strategy that maximises representativeness and gradient coverage while respecting practical constraints such as accessibility. From regional‐scale site identification to pixel‑level station placement, we illustrate methodological choices, the suite of variables defining the gradients, and remaining challenges. The approach facilitates efficient, integrated monitoring of microclimatic, hydrological, and tree‑related variables, thereby enhancing the synergy of research projects within the cluster.

Speaker: Joschka Geissler studied Environmental Engineering at the Technical University Darmstadt Germany, with a focus on hydrology, remote sensing, data analysis, and modelling. He completed his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 2025, working on snow dynamics in forested environments using UAV-based remote sensing and data-driven approaches. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher within a Cluster of Excellence, where he is responsible for the study design and site selection of the large-scale microclimate monitoring network. Joschka has contributed to several international conferences and peer-reviewed publications. His research combines remote sensing, spatial data analysis, and process understanding to improve the understanding of ecohydrological systems ranging from alpine glaciers to lowland forests.

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: Microclimatic and hydrological conditions in forests are key to ecosystem processes and will be influenced by ongoing climate change but are rarely measured or modelled below the canopy. Besides below-canopy measurements, machine learning offer a promising way to model (past) forest microclimates. In this talk, I will show previous work from my Master’s thesis investigating below-canopy CO2 fluxes under different tree species at the ECOSENSE site.  Furthermore, I will briefly introduce my future work within the adaptive measurement network, including quality control, gap-filling and hindcasting of hydroclimatic variables using machine learning.

Speaker: Tabea Wörner completed both her BSc and MSc in Environmental Sciences at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, specialising in Climate Change Ecology. She wrote her Master’s thesis on the topic of CO2 fluxes under beech and Douglas fir. She recently started a PhD at Future Forests, focusing on analysing and modelling forest microclimates. 

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: Models of Forest Dynamics generate projections that can inform strategies to cope with global changes. However, there is no silver-bullet-model that captures all possible drivers of forest dynamics. By following an adequacy for purpose approach, I select models that are conceptually able to solve a specific task. Moreover, I situate my project in the Landscape of the Future Forests Cluster and thus show overlaps with other projects.

Speaker: Andrea has completed his BSc. in Environmental Science and his MSc. in Data Science and Environmental Modelling at the University of Freiburg. He is now a PhD candidate with Future Forests. His research interests include the following questions: How can models inform decision making in forestry? How does global change impact forests? What are the ecological consequences of introducing alien species?

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: Against the background of growing uncertainty and normative ambiguity due to global and climate change, the process of making decisions about the adaptation and transformation of forest SES becomes ever more challenging. Adopting a cultural-analytical perspective on the daily work of forest management actors, this project will examine these processes at an everyday level, focusing on concrete decision-making practices. To this end, ethnographic field research will be conducted with forestry stakeholders, in areas where there has been significant spread of the contested bark beetle species as these infestations are linked to climate change and require swift action from foresters. Key research questions include: How do actors make decisions regarding measures? What knowledge bases are used to justify decisions in the context of increasing uncertainties and ambiguities? What opinions, hopes and emotions come into play? Where do knowledge barriers become apparent? The project considers decisions to be culturally informed and socially embedded. Thus, subtle aspects such as emotionality, affects, hidden power structures and underlying values and visions of the future, as well as their role in decision-making practices, are also taken into account.

Speaker: Enno Link studied cultural and interdisciplinary anthropology at the University of Freiburg. He is now a PhD Candidate at the Cluster of Excellence Future Forests. His focus areas include decision-making practices, human-environment-relationships, (forest) work and knowledge.

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: Changes in the climate bring significant challenges to the survival and development of long-generation tree species. In this talk, we analyze the genomic, transcriptomic, and physiological basis of drought and heat responses in North American conifers of commercial importance. This information allows us to predict future effects of climate change and how to better translate scientific results into forest breeding and management.

Speaker: Amanda De La Torre is an Associate Professor at the NAU School of Forestry, an Affiliate faculty at the School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, and the Director of the Forest Genomics Lab. After obtaining her PhD from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Umea University (Sweden), and later at the University of California-Davis (California, US). As a forest geneticist, Amanda is interested in understanding how long-generation tree species respond to biotic and abiotic stresses using tools in genomics, transcriptomics, physiology, and epigenomics. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, hiking, and painting.

Location: FRIAS, Alter Hörsaal, Room 028

Topic: In this talk, Martin Bemmann would like to do three things: Introduce the approach to forest-related history that he has pursued for some time now; outline, what he intends to do within the framework of the Cluster later this year and how this is supposed to contribute to its work; and initiate a discussion about what Cluster members expect – and possibly hope for – from a historical perspective in Future Forests.

Speaker: Martin Bemmann is a lecturer at the Historical Institute of the University of Freiburg, specializing in the economic and environmental history of Europe since the 19th century, the evolution of international statistics, and the intertwined history of “economy” and “ecology.” His 2023 monograph analyzes the development of global economic statistics (1850‑1950), while his earlier work examined German forest‑damage debates and the role of the International Statistical Institute in shaping modern social‑science concepts. He has held several substitute professorships in modern history at German universities and previously worked at Freiburg’s Chair of East‑Asian History.