Advancing the methods of geo-ecological forests monitoring under global warming

Abstract

One of the most dynamic natural processes on the planetary scale are changes in the global climate caused by changed chemical composition of atmosphere, with the corresponding demonstration of greenhouse effect. Global geosystem monitoring is most up-to-date and actually realizable on the scale of individual ecological regions. However, natural processes and events on the regional hierarchic level are characterized by the greatest diversity and high discreteness, therefore the regional response of global climatic changes inevitably takes the form of multiple reactions of vegetation, soils and landscapes as a whole to background climatic signals. The regional and local levels of geo-ecological prognoses still have not been developed enough due to insufficiency of factual material and methodical difficulties of the transfer of hydro-climatic prognosis from global to regional and local.The report expounds the main statements of original topo-ecological concept of prediction: “Global Changes on the Local Level”, as a basis of terrestrial  bio-ecological and geosystem monitoring under global anthropogenic climatic changes. This concept makes it possible to carry out local empirical simulation of the regional bioclimatic trend and thereby reveal the mechanisms of transmission of global and regional climate signals to the local level. Objects of research are forest and forest-steppe landscape-zonal systems of the headwater of the Volga River basin. They are included in the boreal ecotone of Northern Eurasia as the territory most sensitive to climate change and, accordingly, very favorable for the development of theory and methods of environmental monitoring. The conservation and reproduction of forest resources under changing climatic conditions at the southern boundary of temperate forest zone, where forest communities are in conditions close to critical, is one of the fundamental ecological problems. The strategic goal of monitoring research is to reveal the environmental potential of sustainablility of forest ecosystems in the context of modern global warming.