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Are forest disturbances amplifying or canceling out climate change-induced productivity changes in European forests?

ABSTRACT: Recent studies projecting future climate change impacts on forests mainly consider either the effects of climate change on productivity or on disturbances. However, productivity and disturbances are intrinsically linked because 1) disturbances directly affect forest productivity (e.g. via a reduction in leaf area, growing stock or resource-use efficiency), and 2) disturbance susceptibility is often coupled to a certain development phase of the forest with productivity determining the time a forest is in this specific phase of susceptibility. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of forest productivity changes in different forest regions in Europe under climate change, and partition these changes into effects induced by climate change alone and by climate change and disturbances. We present projections of climate change impacts on forest productivity from state-of-the-art forest models that dynamically simulate forest productivity and the effects of the main European disturbance agents (fire, storm, insects), driven by the same climate scenario in seven forest case studies along a large climatic gradient throughout Europe. Our study shows that, in most cases, including disturbances in the simulations exaggerate ongoing productivity declines or cancel out productivity gains in response to climate change. In fewer cases, disturbances also increase productivity or buffer climate-change induced productivity losses, e.g. because low severity fires can alleviate resource competition and increase fertilization. Even though our results cannot simply be extrapolated to other types of forests and disturbances, we argue that it is necessary to interpret climate change-induced productivity and disturbance changes jointly to capture the full range of climate change impacts on forests and to plan adaptation measures.

SUBMITTER: Reyer CPO

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5572643 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Are forest disturbances amplifying or canceling out climate change-induced productivity changes in European forests?

Reyer Christopher P O CPO Bathgate Stephen S Blennow Kristina K Borges Jose G JG Bugmann Harald H Delzon Sylvain S Faias Sonia P SP Garcia-Gonzalo Jordi J Gardiner Barry B Gonzalez-Olabarria Jose Ramon JR Gracia Carlos C Hernández Juan Guerra JG Kellomäki Seppo S Kramer Koen K Lexer Manfred J MJ Lindner Marcus M van der Maaten Ernst E Maroschek Michael M Muys Bart B Nicoll Bruce B Palahi Marc M Palma João Hn JH Paulo Joana A JA Peltola Heli H Pukkala Timo T Rammer Werner W Ray Duncan D Sabaté Santiago S Schelhaas Mart-Jan MJ Seidl Rupert R Temperli Christian C Tomé Margarida M Yousefpour Rasoul R Zimmermann Niklaus E NE Hanewinkel Marc M

Environmental research letters : ERL [Web site] 20170301 3

Recent studies projecting future climate change impacts on forests mainly consider either the effects of climate change on productivity or on disturbances. However, productivity and disturbances are intrinsically linked because 1) disturbances directly affect forest productivity (e.g. via a reduction in leaf area, growing stock or resource-use efficiency), and 2) disturbance susceptibility is often coupled to a certain development phase of the forest with productivity determining the time a fore ...[more]

PMID: 28855959

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Dataset Information

Are forest disturbances amplifying or canceling out climate change-induced productivity changes in European forests?

Publications

Are forest disturbances amplifying or canceling out climate change-induced productivity changes in European forests?

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