Background information

The Stillberg ecological treeline research site in the Swiss Alps was established in 1975, with the aim to develop ecologically, technically, and economically sustainable reforestation techniques at the treeline to reduce the risk of snow avalanches. In the course of time, additional research aspects gained importance, such as the ecology of the treeline ecotone under global change. Over almost fifty years, research at the Stillberg site combined long-term monitoring of the large-scale high-elevation afforestation with experimental manipulations simulating global change impacts. Besides providing a scientific basis and practical guidelines for high-elevation afforestation, this research has contributed to a comprehensive understanding of ecological processes in the treeline ecotone across different compartments and scales, from individual trees, non-tree vegetation and soils to whole ecosystems, in the context of global change resulting in more than 150 publications.

Dataset generation

We compiled a comprehensive list of scientific publications covering research at the Stillberg research site by conducting searches in the literature databases Web of Science and Google Scholar, as well as in the Digital Object Repository of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL (DORA). We compiled all publications about the afforestation experiment, the FACE × warming experiment, the nutrient addition experiment, the G-TREE experiment, as well as other studies related to the Stillberg research site.

Data description

The Stillberg bibliography (Stillberg_bibliography_data_v1.csv) comprises a comprehensive list of 276 scientific publications, 91 of them published in peer-reviewed ISI journals. Currently the bibliography comprises literature about the main afforestation experiment, the FACE × warming experiment, the nutrient addition experiment, and the G-TREE experiment, as well as further publications related to the Stillberg research site that have been published until August 2023. The bibliography can be filtered for different categories, e.g., experiment, peer-review, source repository or database, and source title. The bibliography is described in a metadata file (Stillberg_bibliography_metadata_v1.csv). The bibliography along with the metadata file are provided in a ZIP-folder (Stillberg_bibliography_v1.zip).

• ETH-Domain ORD Program

EnviDat Project: Treeline Research Stillberg Switzerland

Lechler, L, Rixen, C., Bebi, P., Bavay, M., Marty, M., Barbeito, I., Dawes, M.A., Hagedorn, F., Krumm, F., Möhl, P., Schaub, M. and Frei, E.R., 2023. Fifty years of data enhance the mechanistic understanding of ecological processes in treeline ecotones under global change. In preparation.