11 Sept
Written By Adam Kristensson
After submitting an abstract to the International Boreal Forest Research Association (IBFRA), I received an oral presentation. I was very happy to be asked to present the CLIMB-FOREST project, and I was scheduled to give a talk on August 31st about our work on climate effects of forests and forestry.
After taking the train from Lund to Stockholm and spending some nights at my son’s place I arrived with ferry to Helsinki two days before the day of my presentation, greeted by a very rainy Helsinki!
The symposium was held at the Finlandia-house at the wonderful Tölöviksparken park area at the Tölövik sea bay. I had the opportunity to also visit the Central library located in the area, with a very beautiful and futuristic looking building, and to see the Parliament building. That was basically all sightseeing I had time to do. But, at least I saw some other parts of downtown, when walking to restaurants in the evening and the ferry terminal.
The symposium was about forest research in the boreal area, with lots of opportunities for interaction with forestry stakeholders. The boreal area in the Nordic is basically the entire Nordic except for the southern part of Sweden. So includes a lot of spruce, pine and birch trees.
My first day at the symposium was the same day as my own talk. I am a newcomer when it comes to forestry as my background is in atmospheric aerosol particles. From the keynote presentation in the morning I found out that there is a decision support system for planning and observing outcomes of forest management. I also learned a lot about soil, dry and wetted forest peatlands, and their influence on greenhouse gases when discussing posters with the presenters. I realized there were many talks about disturbances, such as bark beetle infestation, wind and snow damage, and fire risk. I also attended a panel discussion about how we should interact and collaborate more between research and forest industry and the public, which I found very interesting.
The conference organizers did a perfect job, and the lunch and the coffee break cakes served were excellent! The venue staff told me that Finnish people are often lactose intolerant, so they prepare all meals without lactose. Perfect for me, since I am intolerant! I enjoined talking with other researchers over lunch and breaks, it was pretty cool to talk about forests, which I don’t normally do. But, also about other non-scientific related things!
When it was time for my own presentation in late afternoon, I think I was a bit more nervous than usual, maybe because I was among foresters and I don’t understand so much about forestry. But, I would have been even more nervous if the session chairs and presenters weren’t so kind and complimentary about everybody else’s research. No prestige whatsoever.
At my talk, I introduced what CLIMB-FOREST was all about and towards the end I tried to describe what climate effect a forest has in comparison to other less vegetated areas, such as grazed pastures or bare agricultural crop areas . My intention was to really go back to the drawing board and start from the basic of what climate effects a forest causes. The new thing here, is that CLIMB-FOREST researchers will try to convey a message that there are climate effects other than the uptake of carbon dioxide via the photosynthesis, and that we really have to understand these effects before we can make informed decisions on what forest management choices we want to propose for the future European forests to mitigate climate change.
Me and my colleagues in the project have tried to come up, as an initial approach, with some rough numbers of climate effects of individual climate factors in the forest, like effects from atmospheric aerosol particles, light scattering of forest in comparison to a pasture field, the uptake of carbon dioxide via the photosynthesis and what disturbances in the radiative balance this would imply when deforesting a forest area. In science lingo this disturbance is referred to as radiative forcing. A negative radiative forcing leads to a cooling and vice versa.
I tried to explain that some of the forest climate effects of deforestation are cooling the climate and some are warming. The intriguing fact in this all, is that there are at least 10-20 different climate effects of a forest and that many of these are seemingly quite strong in their radiative forcing, so shouldn’t be neglected. So, we really have to take into account these climate effects! Our plan is to write a concept paper about this.
I received some questions about these climate effects when it was time for questions. I was even asked if I would know if we combine all these effects together, if we would have a warming or cooling effect on the climate on short- or long-term if we afforest or deforest. But, I didn’t dare to give an answer on this, since we only have these rough numbers so far. People approached me after my talk about these climate effects and what methods we used in the research, so it felt really rewarding that people were so interested.
As a relaxation after my own talk I got to see the tools that are used to map forests from a close range. These were really cool to play with, and some were even constructed as games. That ended my first day at the symposium.
On the second day, the talks about disturbances continued. Ok, so now I know that this is a really big issue! Two of my colleagues from CLIMB-FOREST project, Morgane Merlin and Susanne Suvanto presented work about wind damage probability in Norwegian forests and predicting root rot damages in Finland. Towards the end of this day, there were very interesting talks about climate change and forestry.
Unfortunately, I had to sail home to Sweden with the ferry the same afternoon so was unable to join in the evening conference dinner. But, I learned a lot of new things about forestry, and spread information about our project, so all in all I found this symposium to be really worth the effort of two lengthy trips to Finland and back.