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Redefining the carbon sink capacity of global forests: The driving role of tree mortality

Objective

Everything that lives must die. Yet when it comes to the world's forests, we know much more about the processes governing their life than those governing their death. Global forests hold enormous amounts of carbon in their biomass, which has absorbed about 20% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions over recent decades. Whether the size of this sink will persist, intensify, decrease or even become a source is highly uncertain, yet knowing this is crucial to the calculation of carbon emission budgets consistent with limiting global temperature rise. One of the most compelling explanations for this uncertainty is a lack of knowledge of how tree mortality affects forest carbon storage on a global scale. Mortality rates and mechanisms are closely tied to forest structure and composition, and thus the storage of carbon in biomass, but mechanistic complexity and the difficulty of measurement have hindered understanding, resulting in a striking lack of consensus in existing assessments. TreeMort will remedy this, combining newly available sources of data with appropriate conceptualisation and innovative modelling, to provide quantifications of the rates and causes of tree death, and their relation to environmental drivers, that set new standards for robustness, comprehensiveness and consistency at the global scale. This breaking-out of the narrower foci of previous work will be a game-changer, finally enabling globally-comprehensive investigation of the extent to which whole forest structure and function are governed by and interact with mortality, and their likely evolution under environmental change. TreeMort will assess this using state-of-the-art ecosystem modelling, which will then be employed to make a fundamental reassessment of the current and future carbon storage capacity of global forests. TreeMort will thus bring us significantly closer to understanding fully how forests interact with the global carbon cycle, assisting efforts to mitigate climate change.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2017-STG

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Host institution

LUNDS UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 480 460,29
Address
Paradisgatan 5c
22100 Lund
Sweden

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Region
Södra Sverige Sydsverige Skåne län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 480 460,29

Beneficiaries (4)

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