BoTWU: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

Trees start growing in spring. It is known they don’t only use rainfall water in summer, but also snow melt water from winter. However, under climate change, the amount and frequency of winter snowfall and summer rainfall is changing. In Finland, the winter snow has decreased the past decades. Will this change BOreal Trees Water Use in summer?

Funders

Three species targeted by the project BoTWU
Norway spruce (Picea abies), Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris), and Silver Birch (Betula pendula) in late winter. Picture: Zuosinan Chen

Project information

Project duration

-

Funded by

Horizon Europe - MCSA

Funding amount

199 694 EUR

Project coordinator

University of Oulu

Unit and faculty

Water, Energy and Environmental Engineering
Faculty of Technology

Contact information

Project leader

Researchers

Project description

BoTWU will go beyond the state-of-the-art in tree water use research by (1) challenging the fundamental and long-standing TWU assumption in isotope hydrology, (2) unravelling the hydrological importance of the forgotten ‘upwards preferential flow’ in ecohydrologic separation, and (3) being the first to provide biophysical process-based knowledge to help boreal ecologists assess forest resistance and resilience to changing precipitation seasonality. It will be supported by up-to-date methodology and instruments, and an innovative experiment set-up. Particularly, high-resolution isotope data on roots to stems will be monitored with the latest in-situ non-destructive water isotope probes (WIP) and analyzed with the Picarro L2140-i. Synchronous half-hourly bi-directional sap flow in stems and roots will be measured also on roots and stems with the heat-plus-method SFM-4 sensors.

Research groups

Hydrology and Water Quality