The Pfynwald research platform (Pfynwald)

At the beginning of this century, numerous Scots pines in the Rhone Valley, one of the driest inner alpine valleys of the European Alps, situated between Brig and Sion (Canton Valais), started showing symptoms of drought. Many older trees had already died. To investigate the causes of the pine dieback, the WSL launched a long-term irrigation experiment in the Pfyn-Finges Nature Park in summer 2003. Since then, the WSL has been comparing the responses of several hundred Scots pines in irrigated forest plots with those of trees that continued to receive only the natural amount of precipitation.

Since 2024, we have implemented an additional, world-wide unique approach to disentangle the processes affected by atmospheric and soil droughts. For more details, see VPDrought-Experiment.

here is the link

Data Manager:

volodymyr_trotsiuk-wsl_ch