2024 HARPER PRIZE SHORTLIST: For the next two weeks, we are featuring the articles shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize. The Harper Prize is an annual award for the best early career research paper published in Journal of Ecology. Haben Blondeel‘s ‘Tree diversity reduces variability in sapling survival under drought’ is one of those shortlisted for the award.
About the paper:
- What is your shortlisted paper about, and what are you seeking to answer with your research?
Forests need to be resilient to rising climate extremes in order to persist under the pressures of global environmental change. Tree diversity has an important role in safeguarding resilience, but is this also true for survival of young planted trees? We specifically asked how tree diversity could act as a biological “insurance” against mortality in response to drought and which functional traits would contribute to an improved survival overall. We indeed found that tree diversity reduced variability in survival under an insurance effect, and that drought-sensitive tree species were most strongly benefitted in diverse mixtures. These findings could contribute to the climate change adaptation of (young) planted forests.
- Were you surprised by anything when working on it? Did you have any challenges to overcome?
This work was a big collaborative effort, synthesizing data from 34 experimental sites within the Tree Diversity Network (TreeDivNet). Harnessing the data from more than 350,000 trees across all these experiments was a challenge in itself: checking and harmonizing these different datasets took a few months longer than I had planned for. Luckily, I had good contacts with all of the data contributors within TreeDivNet who helped me understand their specific datasets and how these could fit in the bigger picture of this synthesis project. This collaborative spirit was not necessarily a surprise but rather a reassurance, to know that your collaborators are there with you along the journey. I am glad that we managed to pull of this project off as a team effort and I am happy with how the paper came together.
- What is the next step in this field going to be?
There is a lot of ongoing work on the mechanisms of how tree diversity can mediate tree responses to drought. Knowledge gaps still exist on how these mechanisms are for instance dependent on environmental or management context, or how unprecedented multi-year drought events can put these tree communities on unforeseen long-term trajectories of change. Another aspect that me and many of the co-authors in this work are exploring is how there could be trade-offs between climate change mitigation and adaptation potential of diverse forests: are diverse mixtures with high adaptation potential also capable of sustaining high mitigation potential (i.e. carbon drawdown)? We believe this to be an important advancement of the field, both for science and practice.
- What are the broader impacts or implications of your research for policy or practice?
Our study supports evidence that an increase in tree diversity has beneficial outcomes on survival of planted forests, already at an early developmental stage. This message is important for forest managers who seek to enhance resilience of forests against an uncertain future.
About the author:
- How did you get involved in ecology?
I have long enjoyed being out in nature and indulging in the beauty of natural surroundings, being interested in what processes (historical, management, geological…) govern how landscapes look the way they do today. I mostly love to do this while walking, with binoculars in hand to observe birds or to look at plants along the paths. Ecology is the study where this broad interest in the natural world comes together: being a bit of a botanist, a soil scientist, a climate scientist, a statistician, etc. This is possibly one of those jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none situations, but I would not want to have it another way.
- What is your current position?
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Forest and Nature Lab (ForNaLab), which is part of the Bioscience Engineering Faculty of Ghent University (Belgium). I received my MSc degree there in 2015 and a PhD in 2019, under the guidance of Professor Kris Verheyen. Being born and raised in Ghent, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity work in a leading research group on forest ecology and management in what is (by approximation) my back yard.
- Have you continued the research your paper is about?
This work was part of two larger research projects: the CAMBIO project (Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in BIOdiverse forest plantations) and the MixForChange project. Here, I am leading the writing of two different articles that look deeper into the role of tree diversity for climate change adaptation and mitigation. In the first, which is submitted for publication, we showed that trees with neighbours that have different drought-tolerance traits are less vulnerable to extreme drought, such as the widespread 2018 drought event in continental Europe. In the second article, we will be looking into potential trade-offs (or synergies) in climate change mitigation and adaptation potential in diverse mixtures across tree diversity experiments in Europe.
- What one piece of advice would you give to someone in your field?
Any interests or skills that you have are inherently relevant for your work. You just need to figure out how to make them relevant.
Find the other early career researchers and their articles that have been shortlisted for the 2024 Harper Prize here!
