Forest Ecology and Management Research Group

Background

Forests worldwide play an essential role in sustaining welfare and well-being of the human society thanks to their climate regulation, soil and water protection, provision of wood and non-wood forest products, recreational and spiritual significance and hosting of large part of the terrestrial biodiversity. But this unique heritage and its related values are at stake in many places: in the tropics mainly as a consequence of deforestation and overexploitation; in temperate and boreal zones mainly through air pollution, simplification of species composition and structure and loss of biodiversity. In the interest of future generations, there is a growing need for investment in forest conservation, afforestation/reforestation and sustainable and multifunctional forest management.

Research topics

Our research group hosts a multidisciplinary team of doctoral researchers, post doctoral researchers and project scientists. The foci of the research team can be summerized in five distinct research topics.

• Restoration ecology and dryland forests

  Plant and bird diversity, seed dispersal, tree recruitment and persistence in fragmented forests in semiarid environments

• Energy, water, carbon and massflow balance of forests

  Sustainability evaluation of carbon sequestration or alternative energy options

• Sustainability indicators

  Development of multi indicator sets for sustainability and environmental impact assessments

• Decision Support Systems (DSS)

  Synthetising and operationalisation of existing knowledge in use frendly software systems to support decision making in complex problems

• Erosion control by means of biota

  Using natures own ecosystem engineers to conserve soil as a first step towards ecosystem restoration

Our mission

We try to contribute to forest conservation, restoration and sustainable management in two different ways.

First we aim at developing methods for sustainability assessment of land and forest management. Such methods can provide an answer to important questions from planners and policy makers, field managers and consumers.

Second, we aim at developing sustainable management systems for specific regions or tree species. Such development is based on thorough knowledge of the ecology of the tree species in relation to the site. We focus on fundamental ecological research concerning dispersion, regeneration and growth of indigenous tree species of the dry tropics.

Our work is explicitly interdisciplinary. It recognizes the complexity of ecosystems, which it approaches at different scale levels. It wants to offer a significant contribution from science to the challenge of sustainable development as an increase in harmony between humans and nature.

Seminar series

We organize two-weekly seminars on forest, nature and landscape research open to all interested students and staff members. Registration is not required. Seminars are held on mondays (12.30h) at the Geo-institute (Celestijnenlaan 200E, Heverlee), seminar room 01.209.

The program of the Autumn 2009 series can be downloaded here (PDF).

Education

We supervise MSc dissertations in the field of forest ecology and management and organize the following courses in dutch language for Bachelor and Master students in Biosciences and Engineering of Land and Forest Management:

• Sylviculture and Nature Conservation: Seminar and Excursions (Dutch)
• Seminar Forest, Nature and Landscape (Dutch)
• Biological Productionsystems (Dutch)
• Forestry (Dutch)
• Integrated practical course in land and forest management (Dutch)
• Planning for Forestry and Nature Conservation (Dutch)
• Applied Botanics (Dutch)
• Silviculture (Dutch)
• Integrated Fieldwork on Forestry and Nature Conservation (Dutch)