INTRODUCTION

 

By organizing the international and interdisciplinary conference "Trees and Dynamics", we wished to favour debates and communication on different researches and initiatives which articulate around trees. Trees are by themselves a research object, as it provokes a scientific interest (ecology, botany...), an economic one (wood...), a politic one (managements...) and last but not least a tourist one (parks, recreation areas...), and it in different time and space scales.

From a common object, trees, the different participants introduced their own researches, and displayed the methods which they set up to reach their targets; their main questionings regarding the past, the present and the future were also appropriate issues to debate.

The participants to this conference gathered the academics and the researchers, but also the forestry workers, the local decision-makers and the different owners of forested areas.

Because the conference links different topics and disciplines, the conference was also suitable for master and PhD students.

 

We will focus on four main topics:

1. Riverside and slope woods

- Hydromorphological disturbances

- Spatio-temporal distribution of slope geodynamics

- Zonal and azonal characteristics of the timberline

 

3. The today forest: multifunctional and multidynamic

- Territorial dynamics because of trees

- Crisis and scars of forest areas

- Tree as a touristic topic

2. The yesterday and the day before yesterday forest

- Forest development during the last 20 000 years

- Management of past forests

- Woodwork and fire wood

4. Tree shapes and landscapes

- Verticality: Tree population dynamics through forestry practices

- Horizontality: spatial distribution, surfaces and linearity

- Urban trees and countryside trees

 

 

CONTEXT

 

 

The international and interdisciplinary conference "Trees and Dynamics" fulfils the end of the EuroDendro2009-2010 project, funded by the Home of Human Sciences (MSH) in Clermont-Ferrand. EuroDendro links members of Geolab and CERAMAC, both laboratories sheltered by the MSH.

At the end of 2010, when the EuroDendro project ends, a seminary was considered, focused on geomorphological advances performed on several study sites located in France, Iceland, Norway and Romania. EuroDendro aimed at spotting in the tree rings of trees colonizing slopes evidence of growth disturbances by geodynamics, particularly snow avalanches; dating the recent events is also a main topic of EuroDendro. Following debates between the different members of EuroDendro, which counts 5 foreigners and 3 French people, it appeared that the trees topic are of interest beyond the slope geodynamic issues.

The MSH in Clermont-Ferrand shelters different researchers who are interested in trees, and not only from a geomorphological point of view. Armelle Decaulne, researcher at Geolab and leader of the EuroDendro project, then joined Eric Langlois, engineer at CERAMAC, and Manon Cabanis, researcher at Geolab, as one and the other have research topics implying trees, either in a forestry and social context, or in an archaeobotanical approach.

By joining the "dynamics" topic, we wish to gather actors with scientific backgrounds, but also land-planners (officials, project managers), and from the forestry world (technicians, engineers and property administrators), all of them witnesses of various dynamics around a common object: the tree.