PhD defence: Aitor Ameztegui "Forest dynamics at the montane-subalpine ecotone in the Eastern Pyrenees"

Aitor Ameztegui will defend his PhD Thesis next july 17th at the Forest Sciences Center of Catalonia (CTFC). Aitor has developed his PhD project "Forest dynamics at the montane-subalpine ecotone in the Eastern Pyrenees", in the FiDBosc group, under supervision of Dr. Lluís Coll, researcher from CTFC and associated researcher from CREAF.

The main objective of this thesis was to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of mixed-conifer forests constituting the montane-subalpine ecotone of the Pyrenees. For this, we identified the main environmental factors that drive the dynamics of these communities to then assess how changes in these factors may affect their future structure and composition. This work was done using a multiscale approach that allowed detecting the key factors determining the dynamics of these systems across different biological scales.

All the information gathered across the different scales was used to parameterize an individual-based, spatially-explicit model of forest dynamics (SORTIE-ND) in order to simulate the future dynamics of the studied forests.The results of the simulations support the predictions of future biome changes in the Pyrenean subalpine forests, since A. alba and P. sylvestris may find appropriate conditions for colonizing mountain pine dominated stands due to land-use change-related forest densification and climate warming, respectively.