Drought-ForC

Coordinating institution : CNRS

Project leader : Jean-Marc Limousin
Project duration : 60 months | October 1st 2023 → September 30th 2028

Grant : 1 496 446 €

 

Institutional partnerships : Aix Marseille Université - INRAE - Université Paris Saclay - CIRAD

Associated institutions : IRD - Bordeaux Sciences Agro

 

The Drought ForC project focuses on forest ecosystems, which are both strongly affected by ongoing climate change and central to climate‑change mitigation strategies. A better understanding of how climate affects the forest carbon sink is a major challenge for both scientists and forest managers.

The questions addressed by Drought ForC include:

• How carbon is allocated among different tree organs, and how photosynthetic assimilation relates to long‑term carbon sequestration in perennial tissues.
• How organic‑matter degradation and soil carbon sequestration respond to the opposing effects of warming and soil drying.
• How water deficit affects mineral nutrition, and the resulting consequences for tree growth and physiological functioning.

The Drought ForC project aims to address these questions by bringing together all French forest sites within the ICOS and AnaEE research infrastructures that measure carbon fluxes using the eddy‑covariance technique or implement in‑situ rainfall‑manipulation experiments, along with a broad consortium of modellers. The project will rely on both existing datasets from each forest site and new experimental setups, combined with a wide range of modelling approaches, to better understand forest responses to climate change, quantify their impacts on the carbon balance, and improve projections under future climate conditions.

The project is designed to strengthen the transfer of experimental knowledge into models and to promote the integration of experimental platforms and modelling efforts at the national scale.

Keywords: forest, tree, drought, litter, rainfall

Drought ForC is a federating project, built upon French forest sites (five belonging to ICOS and four to AnaEE), twelve process‑based models operating at different spatial and temporal scales, and the work of 25 researchers from 10 laboratories.