Field activities for the Drought ForC project (https://www.pepr-faircarbon.fr/projets/projets-laureats-de-l-appel-a-projets-faircarbon/drought-forc) were launched in Puéchabon on April 22 and 23, 2024.
With the help of colleagues from INRAE ISPA (Mark Bakker and Catherine Lambrot) and INRAE BEF (Marie-Pierre Turpault, Serge Didier and Robin Cuby), 54 soil cores were dug in the treatments of the rainfall exclusion experiment that will serve several objectives of the project. Samples will be used to quantify the root biomass and gain new insights into the belowground carbon allocation of the trees, to quantify the soil carbon content and the differences between the precipitation treatments, and also to quantify the soil nutrient availabilty. Samples will be shared and analysed among the laboratories of ISPA in Bordeaux, BEF in Nancy and IMBE in Marseille for the different analyses. Core holes have the been filed with root in-growth cores that will be sampled after 1, 2 and 3 years in order to quantify the root growth and turn-over rate among the different treatments.
Similar sampling campaigns have also been performed in the other French forest sites involved in the Drought ForC project : in Montiers (INRAE BEF/ANDRA) in Meuse, in Hesse (INRAE Silva) in Moselle, In Barbeau (ESE UPSaclay/CNRS) in Seine-et-Marne, in OHP (Eccorev/IMBE, CNRS/AMU) in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in Font-Blanche (INRAE URFM/RECOVER) in Bouches-du-Rhone and in Bilos (INRAE ISPA) in Gironde.
