Globally Outstanding Dissertations

Two junior academics from Freiburg have received the Outstanding Doctoral Research Award of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) for their dissertations, claiming two of the seven prizes for forest science dissertations for Freiburg. The researchers received the awards, which are endowed with 1,000 euros each, at the IUFRO World Congress in Curitiba, Brazil.

In her dissertation “Recovery of a tropical rain forest over 30 years following silvicultural interventions”, which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bauhus, Dr. Angela de Avila studied how tropical rainforest recovered from differing intensities of timber harvesting. As part of an experiment running for more than 30 years she analyzed how resilient the diversity and composition of tree species as well as the carbon stocks of the forests are to human intervention in Brazil’s Amazon region. In her dissertation, Dr. de Avila showed that the rainforests could recover within 30 years if no more than 20 per cent of the original biomass is used. The forests’ resilience depends primarily on how intensely the wood is harvested and thinned. Aspects such as the biodiversity of tree species on the other hand have very little influence on the recovery of the forest. So forests prove to be more resilient to interventions than is often assumed.

Dr. Ida Wallin wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject of “Forest Management and Governance in Sweden – A Phronetic Analysis of Social Practices” at the Swedish university of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), jointly supervised by Prof. Dr. Daniela Kleinschmit for whom she is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow. In her work she casts light on the complex and previously little researched factors behind the behavior of private forest owners. She studied and initiated participatory multi-stakeholder processes with a focus on forest management. Her results show that amongst other things financial cut-backs in forestry consultancy lead to restrictions in multifunctional and local forestry. This then leads to the potential for participatory processes suffering. In addition, Wallin successfully integrated her research in her teaching with a role-playing concept. Her work has contributed to finding new ways and political solutions for the urgent challenges of sustainability in forest management and administration.