Increasing forest disturbances in Europe and their impact on carbon storage

By Rupert Seidl, M. Schelhaas, Werner Rammer, P. J. Verkerk. Nature Climate Change, 2014

1,116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Disturbances from wind, bark beetles, and wildfires have increased in Europe’s forests throughout the 20th century 1. Climatic changes were identified as a main driver behind this increase 2, yet how the expected continuation of climate change will affect Europe’s forest disturbance regime remains unresolved. Increasing disturbances could strongly impact the forest carbon budget 3,4, and are hypothesized to contribute to the recently observed carbon sink saturation in Europe’s forests 5. Here we show that forest disturbance damage in Europe has continued to increase in the first decade of the 21st century. Based on an ensemble of climate change scenarios we find that damage from wind, bark beetles, and forest fires is likely to increase further in coming decades, and estimate the rate of increase to +0.91·106 m3 of timber per year until 2030. We show that this intensification can offset the effect of management strategies aiming to increase the forest carbon sink, and calculate the disturbance-related reduction of the carbon storage potential in Europe’s forests to be 503.4 Tg C in 2021-2030. Our results highlight the considerable carbon cycle feedbacks of changing disturbance regimes, and underline that future forest policy and management will require a stronger focus on disturbance risk and resilience.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a36925eee4be1ff43c49784c61cf2164ad8c181e

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Citations in the corpus

Tropical Dry Forest Diversity, Climatic Response, and Resilience in a Changing Climate (2019, background): “Natural disturbances are expected to increase under climate change in terms of frequency and severity, with increases in fires, insect outbreaks, and wind storms already seen in the boreal forest [94,95].”
Sentinel‐2 accurately maps green‐attack stage of European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus, L.) compared with Landsat‐8 (2018, background): “In recent decades, therefore, increasing disturbances due to insect outbreaks have been widely documented across different parts of the world (Wulder et al. 2006; Lausch et al. 2013a; Seidl et al. 2014).”
How much does climate change threaten European forest tree species distributions? (2018, background): “Also, climate change-mediated disturbances affect growth of trees, especially due to catastrophic winds and herbivorous insect outbreaks (Seidl et al., 2014).”
Pervasive shifts in forest dynamics in a changing world (2020, positive): “Bioticdisturbancesfrominsects,insect – pathogen complexes, and other biotic agents have been increasing in frequency, severity, and extent in recent decades ( 17 , 31 , 102 ) (Fig.”
Natural disturbance impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity in temperate and boreal forests (2015, positive): “A similar trend is evident for wildfire, windthrow, and bark beetles in Europe (Schelhaas et al ., 2003; Seidl et al., 2014).”
Living with bark beetles: impacts, outlook and management options (2019, background): “…disturbances can complement classical forest protection approaches, in that protection focuses on assets of high value in the landscape for which risks can be reduced efficiently, while resilience is fostered and natural disturbances are embraced in other parts of the landscape (Seidl, 2014).”
Manipulating ungulate herbivory in temperate and boreal forests: effects on vegetation and invertebrates. A systematic review (2018, background): “This will become more and more important because climate warming supports increases in ungulate densities in many temperate and boreal forests, while also increasing the probability of stand-replacing disturbances [81, 82].”