Forest disturbances under climate change

By Rupert Seidl, Dominik Thom, Markus Kautz, D. Martin‐Benito, M. Peltoniemi, Giorgio Vacchiano, Jan Wild, D. Ascoli, M. Petr, Juha Honkaniemi and 7 more. Nature Climate Change, 2017

2,383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Forest disturbances are sensitive to climate. However, our understanding of disturbance dynamics in response to climatic changes remains incomplete, particularly regarding large-scale patterns, interaction effects and dampening feedbacks. Here we provide a global synthesis of climate change effects on important abiotic (fire, drought, wind, snow and ice) and biotic (insects and pathogens) disturbance agents. Warmer and drier conditions particularly facilitate fire, drought and insect disturbances, while warmer and wetter conditions increase disturbances from wind and pathogens. Widespread interactions between agents are likely to amplify disturbances, while indirect climate effects such as vegetation changes can dampen long-term disturbance sensitivities to climate. Future changes in disturbance are likely to be most pronounced in coniferous forests and the boreal biome. We conclude that both ecosystems and society should be prepared for an increasingly disturbed future of forests.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f8f5a09d8eeda602409e3f0687b422e71446509

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Citations in the corpus

Forests and Decarbonization – Roles of Natural and Planted Forests (2020, background): “Moreover, sound management can reduce the vulnerability of new forests to disturbances (like wildfires or storm damage), which are predicted to increase in frequency and severity across much of the world (Pechony and Shindell, 2010; Seidl et al., 2017).”
Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests (2020, background): “Thesedisturbance events can matter for local- to regional-scale carbon cycling in some areas but are thought to have relativelyminor-to-modest global effects (25, 53).”
Beneficial microbes ameliorate abiotic and biotic sources of stress on plants (2020, background): “As wild and agricultural plants will experience increasing stress due to global change (Reyer et al., 2013; Seidl et al., 2017; Wheeler & Braun, 2013), our results suggest that the ecological importance of beneficial components of plant microbiomes will increase.”
Which trees die during drought? The key role of insect host‐tree selection (2019, background): “…Nageleisen, Piou, & Vannini, 2006; Raffa et al., 2008; Marchetti et al., 2011; Seidl, Schelhaas, & Lexer, 2011; Jactel et al., 2012; Weed et al., 2013; Anderegg et al., 2015; Haavik et al., 2015; Kolb et al., 2016; Kautz, Meddens, Hall, & Arneth, 2017; Seidl et al., 2017; Wood et al., 2018).”
Instance segmentation of fallen trees in aerial color infrared imagery using active multi-contour evolution with fully convolutional network-based intensity priors (2021, background): “The latter aspect is becoming increasingly important as the frequency and severity of such disturbance events are continuously on the rise due to global change (Seidl et al., 2017).”
Network resilience (2020, background): “Examples are the climate change [5], the global pandemic of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that are changing the world [6], the catastrophe in east Africa caused by the infestation by desert locusts [7], and the 2019-2020 bushfire in Australia that burned through some 10 million hectares”
Climate‐change refugia in boreal North America: what, where, and for how long? (2020, background): “However, under warmer and drier climate conditions, coupled with increased levels of disturbance, these ecosystems are becoming more susceptible to rapid and large- scale change (Erni et al. 2017; Seidl et al. 2017).”
Disturbances amplify tree community responses to climate change in the temperate–boreal ecotone (2019, background): “In addition, the frequency and intensity of natural disturbances can increase as an indirect effect of climate change (Seidl et al., 2017).”
Pervasive shifts in forest dynamics in a changing world (2020, background): “Thus, increasing mortality due to anthropogenic changes and potentially increasing or stable growth and recruitment due to CO2 fertilization (5) represent opposing processes that are co-occurring globally, leaving the fate of future forests uncertain.”
Sentinel‐2 accurately maps green‐attack stage of European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus, L.) compared with Landsat‐8 (2018, background): “Historically, storms and snow breakage events in Europe and North America have provided a large surplus of suitable breeding material for bark beetles, leading to outbreaks (Giunta et al. 2016; Seidl et al. 2017).”