Forest Modelling Lab.

Gina Marano is a forest ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. She holds a PhD in Forest Ecology from ETH Zurich, where her research investigated the drivers and ecological consequences of drought-induced tree mortality. Her work combines process-based forest modelling with long-term observational data to understand how drought, climate extremes and biotic disturbances affect tree growth, mortality, species composition and long-term forest dynamics.

During her doctoral research, she developed and evaluated new versions of the forest gap model ForClim. This work included a parsimonious representation of drought-induced tree mortality inspired by Manion’s decline-disease theory. The framework distinguishes between long-term predisposing stress, acute inciting drought conditions and contributing biotic factors. It has been tested against recent mortality patterns of European beech, Norway spruce and Scots pine in Switzerland and Germany. At WSL, she also contributes to improving the climate sensitivity of MASSIMO, the dynamic forest model of the Swiss National Forest Inventory. She is a lecturer in Quantitative Vegetation Dynamics at ETH Zurich.

Gina has collaborated with the CNR Forest Modelling Lab since 2018. Her current work focuses on developing and testing an improved representation of drought-induced tree mortality in the 3D-CMCC-FEM model. The project will transfer and extend the mortality framework that she developed for ForClim by linking long-term tree predisposition directly to the non-structural carbohydrate dynamics already represented in 3D-CMCC-FEM, rather than relying exclusively on slow growth as a proxy for declining vitality. She will also investigate how chronic carbon limitation interacts with acute drought stress and hydraulic constraints.

Her work in the 3D-CMCC-FEM model will include reformulating the mortality equations, implementing them in C, parameterising and initialising the model, selecting suitable observational sites, running simulations and analysing model outputs. Initial testing will focus on stands dominated by European beech and Norway spruce, with possible extensions to Scots pine and oak species. Crown-defoliation observations from ICP Forests will be explored for model evaluation. For Norway spruce, the potential integration of drought-mediated bark beetle risk will also be investigated.