Search

To enhance our understanding of forest carbon sequestration, climate change mitigation and drought impact on forest ecosystems, the availability of high-resolution annual forest growth maps based on tree-ring width (TRW) would provide a significant advancement to the field. Site-specific characteristics, which can be approximated by high-resolution Earth observation by satellites (EOS), emerge as crucial drivers of forest growth, influencing how climate translates into tree growth. EOS provides information on surface reflectance related to forest characteristics and thus can potentially improve the accuracy of forest growth models based on TRW. Through the modelling of TRW using EOS, climate and topography data, we showed that species-specific models can explain up to 52 % of model variance (Quercus petraea), while combining different species results in relatively poor model performance (R 2  = 13 %). The integration of EOS into models based solely on climate and elevation data improved the explained variance by 6 % on average. Leveraging these insights, we successfully generated a map of annual TRW for the year 2021. We employed the area of applicability (AOA) approach to delineate the range in which our models are deemed valid. The calculated AOA for the established forest-type models was 73 % of the study region, indicating robust spatial applicability. Notably, unreliable predictions predominantly occurred in the climate margins of our dataset. In conclusion, our large-scale assessment underscores the efficacy of combining climate, EOS and topographic data to develop robust models for mapping annual TRW. This research not only fills a critical void in the current understanding of forest growth dynamics but also highlights the potential of integrated data sources for comprehensive ecosystem assessments., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Medium carbon high-silicon abrasion resistant (AR) steel was examined by performing dilatometry, light optical microscopy (LOM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and hardness measurements after isothermal bainitization and modified martempering and compared to direct quenching technology. A commercial thermodynamic tool was used for hardness prediction and compared to the measured one and revealed a rather good agreement for direct quenching, as was the case for isothermal holdings near to the martensite start (Ms). The predicted martensite start temperatures were in good agreement with the experimental data, the experimental value was 321 °C, while the predicted values were 324 and 296 °C. However, a higher discrepancy appeared for isothermal holding much above the martensite transition in the bainite region resulting in lower measured hardness compared to the predictions related to the actual kinetics and complexity of the formed final volume percentages of phase constituents such as bainite, martensite, and rest austenite, later as a part of unfinished bainite transformation at studied temperature. The predicted hardness values for quenching, isothermal holding at 280, 300 and 350 °C were 50.6, 50.6, 49.4 and 49.4 HRC, while the measured values were 53.3, 48.3, 48 and 43 HRC, respectively. A very good agreement between the thermodynamic prediction was achieved by comparing the measured Ms concerning prior austenite grain size as one of the crucial parameters for setting a proper heat treatment strategy of various isothermal quenchings making thermodynamic predictions for low alloyed steels a powerful tool for optimizing the heat-treating operations.

Environmental conditions affect tree-ring width (TRW), wood structure, and, consequently, wood density, which is one of the main wood quality indicators. Although studies on inter- and intra-annual variability in tree-ring features or density exist, studies demonstrating a clear link between wood structure on a cellular level and its effect on wood density on a macroscopic level are rare. Norway spruce with its simple coniferous structure and European beech, a diffuse-porous angiosperm species were selected to analyze these relationships. Increment cores were collected from both species at four sites in Slovenia. In total, 24 European beech and 17 Norway spruce trees were sampled. In addition, resistance drilling measurements were performed just a few centimeters above the increment core sampling. TRW and quantitative wood anatomy measurements were performed on the collected cores. Resistance drilling density values, tree-ring (TRW, earlywood width-EWW, transition-TWW, and latewood width-LWW) and wood-anatomical features (vessel/tracheid area and diameter, cell density, relative conductive area, and cell wall thickness) were then averaged for the first 7 cm of measurements. We observed significant relationships between tree-ring and wood-anatomical features in both spruce and beech. In spruce, the highest correlation values were found between TRW and LWW. In beech, the highest correlations were observed between TRW and cell density. There were no significant relationships between wood-anatomical features and resistance drilling density in beech. However, in spruce, a significant negative correlation was found between resistance drilling density and tangential tracheid diameter, and a positive correlation between resistance drilling density and both TWW + LWW and LWW. Our findings suggest that resistance drilling measurements can be used to evaluate differences in density within and between species, but they should be improved in resolution to be able to detect changes in wood anatomy., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Arnič, Krajnc, Gričar and Prislan.)