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Abstract
[...]some good policy moves are afoot: the new EU Forest Strategy for 2030, released in July 2021, and other high-level policy initiatives by the European Commission, formally recognize the multifunctional value of forests, including their role in regulating atmospheric processes and climate. A global synthesis of various drought conditions showed, for instance, that forests were more resilient when trees with a greater diversity of strategies for using and transporting water lived together7. Relatively little is known about the impacts of other kinds of extremes, such as a 'false spring' caused by an early-season bout of warm weather, a late spring frost, heavy rainfall events, ozone maxima, or exposure to high levels of solar radiation during dry, cloudless weather. In an ideal world, scientists would know, for example, how the variation in canopy density, vegetation age, and species diversity protects against storm damage; and whether and how the diversity of canopy structures controls atmospheric processes such as cloud formation in the wake of extremes. [...]unique insights into plant responses to stress are coming from timelapse photography of leaf orientation; accelerometer measures of movement patterns of stems have been shown to provide proxies for the drought stress of trees19.