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The emergence of more intense, extreme wildfires in Europe poses many threats to forests, economic well-being and human health and safety. In a rapidly changing climate that is expected to further exacerbate fire risk in most European areas, many questions remain regarding how forest structure and composition can mitigate these trends. This is for instance the case in France where the 2022 extreme fire season in the southwestern part of the country has fueled the debate about the role of forest structure and composition in the occurrence and intensity of forest fires.

These debates highlight the lack of robust scientific knowledge on how vegetation characteristics impacts fire behavior and how in turn, such vegetation characteristics are driven by physiological processes such as plant hydraulics. These knowledge gaps hamper our capacity to bring robust scientific elements on a number of fundamental issues for key European forests such as: “Are monoculture stands more vulnerable to fires than mixtures? Is fire risk higher in coniferous forests than in broadleaf forests? Do microclimatic effects induced by forest structure can limit drought impact on forest flammability? How fire risk will respond to novel and changing climate conditions in different ecosystems?

Improving our understanding of these issues requires an interdisciplinary approach, going from wildfire sciences to ecology and forestry. In this workshop, we will aim to bridge these gaps and synthesize knowledge and scientific debates about the underlying physiological and ecological processes that influence fire risk at stand scale. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary group of researchers will be gathered with the following objectives.

-        Identify key research questions and knowledge gaps in the relation between tree diversity, plant functioning and fire risk in European forests. A review paper will be written to summarize the scientific outputs of the workshop.

-        Stimulate research interactions between researchers from forestry, ecological sciences and wildfire sciences and favor connections between European research institutes.

Build a network of interdisciplinary researchers that will be able to respond future project calls.

PSI-HUB workshop Programpdf - 109,5 kB