Global Tree-Ring Growth Evolution Neural Network (VS-GENN)

The project addresses a fundamental problem of forest reaction forecast to the climate change and increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases for the terrestrial ecosystems of the Earth. The main target is to produce a retrospective assessment and a short-term forecast of annual tree-ring productivity (seasonal cell production) of the major conifer plant species in terrestrial forest ecosystems around Eurasia forced by climate and non-climatic factors. The analysis is based on an Interactive Information platform “Global Tree-Ring Growth Evolution Neural Network” (www.vs-genn.ru) and datasets available for the European and Asian dendroecological test-polygons. To achieve the goal of the project, we testified the Vaganov-Shaskin model and its parametrization, as a part of the developing IT system, based on direct long-term field observations for the tree-ring sites in Europe and Asia. As a result of the fellowship four papers were published in high impacted ISI journals. Moreover, a special issue of the ISI journal “Annals of Forest Science” is prepared.