Abstract

Keywords

Ozone, Symptoms, Risk assessment, Forests, Europe

Abstract

There is ample evidence that current concentrations of tropospheric ozone (O3) cause negative effects on plants. The present chapter describes a systematic and statistical sound way of monitoring visible injury at the European intensive monitoring plots that may allow detecting spatial and temporal trends on a national or transnational scale. The extended database of monitoring data from different forest ecosystems in more than 15 European countries and covering the past 10 years provides a solid basis for O3 risk assessment. In combination with the current assessment of O3 visible injury on forest plants that are grown under natural field conditions, further, long-term studies of physiological measurements are needed to gain a better understanding of the complex interactions between plants and atmosphere, in particular, when considering climate change that may alter the risk of O3 for our forests.

LWF Classification

Network: LWF, Category: peer-reviewed,