Earth and Environmental Science

Biography

Remus Prăvălie is a teaching assistant and a researcher at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography. His interdisciplinary research is concerned with the field of global environmental issues such as climate change, impact of climate change on environmental systems or environmental pollution, but also with the solutions of these environmental issues, like renewable energies. He has completed his PhD at the age of 27 years at the University of Bucharest and is currently manager of a postdoctoral project at the same university. Remus Prăvălie has published more than 20 papers in prestigious journals in the field of environmental sciences. Georgeta Bandoc is a professor at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography. Her main scientific work is generally concerned with the field of renewable energy resources, climate change or environmental protection. She has a broad expertise in the field of environmental sciences and currently is a member of various professional associations and centers. Since 2016 is an Associate Member in the Academy of Romanian Scientists. Georgeta Bandoc has published more than 20 papers in prestigious journals in the field of environmental sciences.

Research Interest

Forests are probably the most important type of terrestrial ecosystem for ensuring the planet's health in an age of major environmental changes. These ecosystems are among the Earth's few biophysical systems that are able to substantially influence the climatic system on a global scale, especially by controlling and storing immense carbon amounts in their biomass, but also through energy exchanges with the atmosphere and by changing the terrestrial surface radiation balance. Also, these biotic systems are a vital support for the global terrestrial biodiversity and an essential pillar for the very existence of humanity, via large-scale delivery of ecosystem services they provide. However, forest ecosystems are currently being subjected to a wide range of negative transformations (natural and anthropic disturbances) that pose a real threat not only to forest health and the various benefits forests provide for human society, but also to the overall functioning of the Earth's climate system. This work is a review that aims to analyse the current main perturbations of the global forest ecosystems, both the obvious (e.g. deforestation) and discrete ones (e.g. defaunation) that have generally not yet been tackled strictly as ecological forest issues in the international scientific literature. Also, the paper aims to investigate the possible consequences caused by forest perturbations in the global climate changes (warming process), through carbon fluxes and biogeophysical feedbacks between these biotic systems and the atmosphere. Following a vast, current and representative scientific literature, it was found there currently are 12 major forest disturbances that can be grouped into three categories based on the importance of triggering causes, i.e. climatic (phenological shifts, range shifts, die-off events, insect infestations), anthropic (deforestation, fragmentation, air pollution) and mixed (defaunation, fires, composition shifts, net primary productivity shifts, biogeochemical shifts) perturbations. These forest perturbations have already significantly eroded the forests' capacity to mitigate climate change through key processes such as carbon sequestration and the evaporative cooling process. All these ecological disturbances can destabilize the Earth's climate system by accelerating global warming in various ways, including by means of many positive feedback mechanisms in the case of climatic perturbations. In this respect, this review paper finally proposes five major anthropogenic strategies to fight this multiple forest crisis (mitigate, adapt, repair, protect and research actions), which, if applied rapidly, on a large scale and in a mixed manner, can successfully mitigate forest ecological issues and climate change by the end of this century.