Ozone exposure, defoliation of beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) and visible foliar symptoms on native plants in selected plots of South-Western Europe

The relationships between crown defoliation of beech, visible foliar symptoms on native vegetation and ozone exposure were investigated on permanent monitoring sites in South-Western Europe in the years 2000–2002. Relationships between defoliation of beech and O3 (seasonal mean, 2-week maximum, AOT40) were investigated by means of multiple regression models (11 plots, 1–3 years of data each) and a model based on temporal autocorrelation of defoliation data (14 plots, 1–3 years of data each). Different multiple regression techniques were used. The four models generated (R2 = 0.71–0.85, explained variance in cross-validation 61–78%) identified several significant predictors of defoliation, with AOT40 (p = 0.008) and foliar content of phosphorous (p = 0.0002–0.0004) being common to all models. The autocorrelation model (R2 = 0.55; p < 0.0001) was used to calculate expected defoliation on the basis of the previous year's defoliation, and model predictions were used as an estimate of expected defoliation under constant site and environmental condition. Residuals (predicted-measured) plotted against current AOT40 shows that a possible effect of ozone occurs only at very high AOT40 (>35,000 ppbh). O3-like visible foliar symptoms were recorded on 65 species at 47% of the common monitoring sites in 2001 and 38% in 2002. No relationship was found between O3 exposure, frequency of symptomatic sites and frequency of species with symptoms (R2 = 0.11; p > 0.05). A number of questions related to the ecological and methodological basis of the survey were identified. Inherent sampling and non-sampling errors and multicollinearity of the data suggest great caution when examining results obtained from mensurational, correlative studies.