The FutureForests Doctoral Network is excited to announce the official launch of its Online Journal Club, a core virtual training initiative designed to keep our 15 Doctoral Researchers (DRs) and multi-institutional supervisors at the forefront of global change ecology.
Fostering collaboration between members of the FutureForests Network, who are spread out across eight European countries, requires more than annual in-person gatherings, and so the Online Journal Club was established to create a regular, interactive forum for continuous scientific dialogue across the entire consortium.
The Journal Club is designed to deliver both high-level scientific synthesis and essential career development skills:
- Critical Science Reviews: DRs and PIs critically evaluate the latest peer-reviewed publications, emerging methodologies, and innovative experimental designs in forest ecology, soil biogeochemistry, and ecological modeling.
- Linking to Local Research: participants assess the direct implications of newly published findings for the DR’s 15 individual research projects, relating it to their own field and laboratory work.
- Building Transferable Employability Skills: by leading and participating in discussions, the DRs hone their skills in peer review, critical thinking, oral presentation, scientific debate, and virtual session moderation, contributing directly to the network’s 27 ECTS credit training curriculum.
- Network Community: the regular virtual meetings maintain strong peer-to-peer connections and cross-facility collaborations in-between the annual on-site training schools.
The first meeting, held on Wednesday 30th September 2026, focused on discussing an article from the New Phytologist Foundation titled ‘Beyond source and sink control – toward an integrated approach to understand the carbon balance in plants’ (Gessler & Zweifel, 2024 – NewPhyt https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.19611).
The problem:
Historically, photosynthesis has largely been considered the starting point of plant growth (i.e. growth is controlled by source activity). However, recent evidence shows that, in many cases, sink activity may be the main driver – or even that environmental conditions can directly affect growth processes without the need for internal feedbacks. The matter hasn’t been clearly resolved yet, as different perspectives lead to different conclusions.The proposed approach:
The missing piece of the puzzle for the complete coordination of whole-plant responses could be represented by stomatal regulation, which, as they argue, is optimized by plants to maximize growth to avoid a C source-sink mismatch. Furthermore, source-sink relationships influence structural and functional traits, the variation of which in turn feedbacks on source-sink dynamics themselves. In other words, a tree does not consist of static structures that respond always in the same way to the same environmental conditions.
The Online Journal Club will continue to meet bimonthly throughout the project lifecycle, alternating between journal reviews and early-data workshops where DRs can present preliminary findings for network feedback.