BoTWU: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

Trees start growing in spring. It is known that they don't only use rainfall water in summer, but also use snowmelt water from winter. Under climate change, the amount and frequency of winter snowfall and summer rainfall is changing. In Finland, winter snow has increased in some regions and decreased in others. 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

01.10.2023 - 30.09.2025

Funded by

Horizon Europe - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (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

Academy Research Fellow, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow

Zuosinan Chen

Researchers

Postdoctoral 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 assumption of tree water uptake (TWU) in isotope hydrology, (2) unravelling the hydrological importance of the forgotten ‘upwards preferential flow’ in ecohydrologic separation, and (3) providing biophysical process-based knowledge of TWU 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 of TWU will be monitored with the latest in-situ non-destructive water isotope probes (WIP) and analyzed with the Picarro L2140-i. The synchronous half-hourly bi-directional sap flow will also be measured with the heat-plus sensors.