Forest Ecophysiological Responses to Biotic, Abiotic, and Compound Environmental Stresses: Mechanisms and Adaptive Strategies

Forest ecosystems are increasingly exposed to a wide range of interacting abiotic and biotic stressors that threaten their functioning, stability, and capacity to provide essential ecosystem services. Abiotic drivers such as drought, heatwaves, altered precipitation regimes, high irradiance, soil nutrient limitations, salinity, and atmospheric pollution directly influence tree physiology, affecting carbon assimilation, water relations, growth, and survival. Concurrently, biotic agents—including pathogens, herbivorous insects, and symbiotic organisms—play a crucial role in shaping forest health and productivity, often amplifying or mitigating the impacts of abiotic stress.

Under ongoing climate change, the intensity, frequency, and co-occurrence of these stressors are expected to increase, leading to shifts in species distributions, altered forest structure and composition, and feedbacks to the global carbon and water cycles. Trees and forest communities are thus likely to experience more frequent compound and sequential stress events, challenging their acclimation capacity and long-term resilience across spatial and temporal scales.

Forest ecophysiology seeks to understand the mechanisms underlying tree responses to environmental variability, from cellular and biochemical processes to whole-tree function and ecosystem dynamics. While considerable progress has been made in characterizing individual stress responses, a major limitation remains the insufficient integration of multiple, interacting stress factors under realistic field conditions. Addressing this gap is essential for predicting forest responses to global change and for informing sustainable forest management and conservation strategies.

This Research Topic aims to advance our understanding of the ecophysiological processes governing tree and forest responses to combined biotic and abiotic constraints, with particular emphasis on scaling from organ to ecosystem levels and linking physiological mechanisms to forest function under changing environmental conditions. We welcome original research articles, reviews, methodological advances, and meta-analyses that contribute novel insights into forest ecophysiology, including but not limited to:

• Tree physiological responses (e.g., photosynthesis, respiration, hydraulics) to abiotic and biotic stressors and their interactions under field and experimental conditions

• Mechanistic understanding of carbon, water, and nutrient fluxes in forests under stress

• Integration of biochemical, molecular, and genetic processes with whole-tree and stand-level responses

• Advances in methodologies, including remote sensing, modeling, and in situ measurements of forest function

• Tree acclimation, adaptation, and phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental variability and extreme events

• Stress memory, legacy effects, and resilience in long-lived woody species

• Plant–soil–microbiome interactions and their role in mediating forest responses to environmental change

• Scaling approaches linking leaf- and tree-level processes to ecosystem and biosphere dynamics

• Impacts of disturbances (e.g., drought, fire, pests) on forest ecophysiology and recovery trajectories

• Implications of ecophysiological responses for forest management, conservation, and climate feedbacks

Overall, this collection seeks to bridge mechanistic understanding and ecosystem-scale perspectives, providing a comprehensive framework to assess and predict forest resilience in a rapidly changing world.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: plant ecophysiology, abiotic constraints, biotic constraints, combined stressors, adaptive strategies, climate change

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.