ZAW - Centre for Alpine Forestry

Funding and duration:

 Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation | 2026-2030

Summary:

Alpine forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services: from protecting settlements from natural hazards and providing habitats to producing timber. In the Bavarian Alps, 60% of the forest area consists of protective forests that shield settlements and infrastructure from avalanches, debris flows, and rockfalls. Climate change poses growing challenges for these forests: warming in the Alpine region is twice as fast as the global average. It is still unclear whether the protective forests will be able to maintain their function in the long term under these conditions.

The Centre for Alpine Forestry (ZAW) at TUM, funded by the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation, brings together the expertise of five professorships to address these issues in an interdisciplinary manner and to create a scientifically sound basis for the conservation of Alpine protective forests.
However, how the ecosystem services of alpine forests vary spatially remains largely unclear, as comprehensive coverage based solely on terrestrial surveys is hardly possible.

Remote sensing offers a promising approach for continuously recording ecosystem services and the ecosystem functions that control them over large areas. Subproject 4 of the ZAW is exploiting this potential and developing new methods for mapping and quantifying the ecosystem services and functions of alpine forests using high-resolution satellite data. To this end, an Alpine Data Cube is first being set up to convert multi-temporal satellite data for the Alpine region into an analysable form. Based on this, phenological metrics such as the beginning and end of the growing season or seasonal vegetation dynamics are derived from satellite time series and spatially mapped. Plant phenology, the study of cyclical biological events such as bud break, flowering, seed formation and leaf fall depending on climatic conditions, is one of the most sensitive indicators of global change. Satellite-based phenology data therefore make it possible to track climate-induced changes in Alpine forests on a large scale. In a further step, these data will be compared with high-resolution dendrometer measurements from sub-projects 1 and 2 in order to better understand the potential of both methods.

Research Team:

This is a joint collaboration between: the Professorship of Ecoclimatology, the Professorship for Tree Growth and Wood Physiology, the Professorship for Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management in Mountain Landscapes, and the Professorship of Forest Management. 

Project owner: 

For more information please contact: Florian.Drebes(at)tum.de

Recent publications: 

Current publications are in process and will be posted once available.