DROMIC
Alessandra Lagomarsino
Roberta Pastorell
Marcus Schaub
2025 - 2026
In the last decades, several forest ecosystems have been affected by an accumulation of deadwood in some regions of Europe, due to more frequent drought pressure and heatwaves.
We hypothesized drought being also a key driver of deadwood decomposition process, affecting
- microbial composition and functioning and
- C and N cycling, with potential effects on soil C storage and dynamics.
DROMIC aimed at investigating:
- the abundance of fungal and bacterial communities in deadwood at different stages of natural decay and in the underlying soil;
- the relationship between microbial composition, substrate quality (C and N contents, C/N ratio) and potential activities (enzyme activities and fluxes of CO2, CH4 and N2O) in both components (deadwood and soil);
- the impact of drought on microbial composition and processes. Moreover,
- the microbial community composition and activity in deadwood and soil is an indicator of microbial forest biodiversity potential, providing background information on forest health and resilience capacity under increasing drought conditions.
To achieve these objectives a gradient of increasing drought (800-, 657- and 556-mm annual precipitation) was selected in European pine forests: Rosalia Lehrforst (Austria), Pfynwald research platform (Switzerland) and Doñana LTSER Platform (Spain). For each site the following attributes will be measured and compared: - Lying deadwood volume - Microbial functional group abundance in deadwood and soil - Microbial biodiversity indexes of deadwood and soil - Potential GHGs production in deadwood and soil - Potential enzyme activities in deadwood and soil