Unlike many researchers, who spend their time in laboratories or at their laptops, Dr. Josefine Umlauft takes her research out into nature. She is the team leader of the Earth and Environmental Sciences group at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, as well as being a geophysicist. On glaciers and in forests, Josefine Umlauft conducts environmental seismology field campaigns at the intersection of Earth system sciences and machine learning, using seismic measurements to investigate processes on the Earth’s surface. Her current fieldwork conducted together with the Systematic Botany & Functional Biodiversity Working Group by Prof. Alexandra Weigelt and Prof. Christian Wirth took her to the Research Arboretum ARBOfun in Großpösna. This arboretum is a scientific platform that enables researchers to compare the characteristics of numerous tree species. There, she installed ten new ground-based seismometers on loan from GIPP Potsdam (Geophysikalischer Gerätepool Potsdam).

Research on the Impacts of Climate Change on Forests

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts and storms. This is putting forests under growing physiological and mechanical stress. Analyzing this stress using standard indicators is costly and difficult to scale up for continuous long-term monitoring of entire stands. Josefine Umlauft and her colleagues Karin Mora, Fabian Limberger, Kilian Gerberding, Christian Wirth, Christiane Werner and Teja Kattenborn are searching for new, cost-effective indicators to measure the stress on trees caused by climate change, which could potentially fill a mesoscale gap in the wide range of established instruments for forest monitoring.

The seismic fingerprint of wind-induced tree sway

To this end, she has already investigated wind-induced tree sway, serving as a first proof of concept. Using seismometers on the ground and accelerometers attached to tree trunks at the ECOSENSE site in the Black Forest, tree sway signals were recorded simultaneously and subsequently isolated and analyzed based on spectral decomposition and vibration mode tracking. It was demonstrated that seismometers can passively monitor the biomechanical response of trees. Furthermore, compared to other tree-attached devices, seismometers offer the advantages of being non-invasive and low-maintenance. Further, they have the potential to answer species-specific questions and to capture responses across forest plots.

Current Research Project in Großpösna

At the ARBOfun Research Arboretum in Großpösna, Josefine Umlauft and her colleagues aim to investigate the extent to which seismic indicators can serve as an approach for monitoring the trees’ hydrological state. In the long term, this research could contribute to new scalable and non-invasive methods for monitoring forest health and resilience under climate change.