Modelling Forest Resilience Under Climate Change: Integrating Hydrology and Carbon Sequestration through Process-Based and Data-Driven Approaches

Forests are key regulators of the Earth’s carbon and water cycles, yet their resilience is increasingly challenged by global warming, recurrent heatwaves, and prolonged water scarcity. These climatic extremes alter evapotranspiration, soil moisture dynamics, and carbon exchange processes, ultimately threatening the capacity of forests and mangroves to function as carbon sinks. Understanding how hydrological variability drives carbon sequestration—and how feedbacks emerge under a changing climate—is essential to keeping ecosystems within safe operating limits of the Planetary Boundaries framework.

This special collection invites contributions that explore measurement techniques and modelling frameworks linking hydrology, carbon fluxes, and vegetation resilience across different biomes—from boreal and temperate to tropical and subtropical ecosystems. Process-based hydrological models such as the GR family, HBV, Topmodel, and SWAT+ offer valuable mechanistic insights into water balance and storage dynamics, while data-driven and hybrid approaches—including conditional probability distributions, regression trees, artificial neural networks, and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks—enable the discovery of complex, nonlinear relationships from extensive environmental datasets.

The convergence of big data, flux tower networks, and remote-sensing observations now allows for global-scale assessments of forest–atmosphere interactions, enabling new ways to detect causal-effect relationships between hydrological stress and carbon exchange. However, several open questions remain: How can we reconcile process-based understanding with data-driven inference to better represent drought and heatwave impacts? What defines the limits of forest resilience under compounded water and temperature stress? Can integrated models capture early-warning indicators of tipping points in carbon and water cycling?

By combining diverse modelling and measuring philosophies and leveraging large environmental datasets, this special issue aims to advance the predictive understanding of coupled hydrological–carbon processes under climate change. Contributions addressing cross-scale interactions, feedback mechanisms, and the role of water availability in maintaining vegetation resilience are particularly encouraged. Collectively, these studies will help refine the tools needed to anticipate and manage ecosystem responses within the rapidly shifting boundaries of the Earth system.

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
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

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Article types

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

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• 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: Forest resilience, Hydrology–carbon coupling, Drought and heatwave impacts, Data-driven and process-based modeling

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.