Forest disturbances under climate change.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Seidl R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5572641 | biostudies-other | 2017 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Publications
Forest disturbances under climate change.
Seidl Rupert R Thom Dominik D Kautz Markus M Martin-Benito Dario D Peltoniemi Mikko M Vacchiano Giorgio G Wild Jan J Ascoli Davide D Petr Michal M Honkaniemi Juha J Lexer Manfred J MJ Trotsiuk Volodymyr V Mairota Paola P Svoboda Miroslav M Fabrika Marek M Nagel Thomas A TA Reyer Christopher P O CPO
Nature climate change 20170531
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 disturbance ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Carbon allocation plays a key role in ecosystem dynamics and plant adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Hence, proper description of this process in vegetation models is crucial for the simulations of the impact of climate change on carbon cycling in forests. Here we review how carbon allocation modelling is currently implemented in 31 contrasting models to identify the main gaps compared with our theoretical and empirical understanding of carbon allocation. A hybrid approach based on combining several principles and/or types of carbon allocation modelling prevailed in the examined models, while physiologically more sophisticated approaches were used less often than empirical ones. The analysis revealed that, although the number of carbon allocation studies over the past 10 years has substantially increased, some background processes are still insufficiently understood and some issues in models are frequently poorly represented, oversimplified or even omitted. Hence, current challenges for carbon allocation modelling in forest ecosystems are (i) to overcome remaining limits in process understanding, particularly regarding the impact of disturbances on carbon allocation, accumulation and utilization of nonstructural carbohydrates, and carbon use by symbionts, and (ii) to implement existing knowledge of carbon allocation into defence, regeneration and improved resource uptake in order to better account for changing environmental conditions.
| S-EPMC6995853 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Forest ecosystems depend on their capacity to withstand and recover from natural and anthropogenic perturbations (that is, their resilience)1. Experimental evidence of sudden increases in tree mortality is raising concerns about variation in forest resilience2, yet little is known about how it is evolving in response to climate change. Here we integrate satellite-based vegetation indices with machine learning to show how forest resilience, quantified in terms of critical slowing down indicators3-5, has changed during the period 2000-2020. We show that tropical, arid and temperate forests are experiencing a significant decline in resilience, probably related to increased water limitations and climate variability. By contrast, boreal forests show divergent local patterns with an average increasing trend in resilience, probably benefiting from warming and CO2 fertilization, which may outweigh the adverse effects of climate change. These patterns emerge consistently in both managed and intact forests, corroborating the existence of common large-scale climate drivers. Reductions in resilience are statistically linked to abrupt declines in forest primary productivity, occurring in response to slow drifting towards a critical resilience threshold. Approximately 23% of intact undisturbed forests, corresponding to 3.32 Pg C of gross primary productivity, have already reached a critical threshold and are experiencing a further degradation in resilience. Together, these signals reveal a widespread decline in the capacity of forests to withstand perturbation that should be accounted for in the design of land-based mitigation and adaptation plans.
| S-EPMC9385496 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ContextGrowing evidence suggests that climate change could substantially alter forest disturbances. Interactions between individual disturbance agents are a major component of disturbance regimes, yet how interactions contribute to their climate sensitivity remains largely unknown.ObjectivesHere, our aim was to assess the climate sensitivity of disturbance interactions, focusing on wind and bark beetle disturbances.MethodsWe developed a process-based model of bark beetle disturbance, integrated into the dynamic forest landscape model iLand (already including a detailed model of wind disturbance). We evaluated the integrated model against observations from three wind events and a subsequent bark beetle outbreak, affecting 530.2 ha (3.8 %) of a mountain forest landscape in Austria between 2007 and 2014. Subsequently, we conducted a factorial experiment determining the effect of changes in climate variables on the area disturbed by wind and bark beetles separately and in combination.ResultsiLand was well able to reproduce observations with regard to area, temporal sequence, and spatial pattern of disturbance. The observed disturbance dynamics was strongly driven by interactions, with 64.3 % of the area disturbed attributed to interaction effects. A +4 °C warming increased the disturbed area by +264.7 % and the area-weighted mean patch size by +1794.3 %. Interactions were found to have a ten times higher sensitivity to temperature changes than main effects, considerably amplifying the climate sensitivity of the disturbance regime.ConclusionsDisturbance interactions are a key component of the forest disturbance regime. Neglecting interaction effects can lead to a substantial underestimation of the climate change sensitivity of disturbance regimes.
| S-EPMC5494037 | biostudies-literature
Project description: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.
| S-EPMC5572643 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Widely recognized as a significant carbon sink, North American forests have experienced a history of recovery and are facing an uncertain future. This growing carbon sink is dictated by recovery from land-use change, with growth trajectory modified by environmental change. To address both processes, we compiled a forest inventory dataset from North America to quantify aboveground biomass growth with stand age across forest types and climate gradients. Here we show, the biomass grows from 90 Mg ha-1 (2000-2016) to 105 Mg ha-1 (2020?s), 128 Mg ha-1 (2050?s), and 146 Mg ha-1 (2080?s) under climate change scenarios with no further disturbances. Climate change modifies the forest recovery trajectory to some extent, but the overall growth is limited, showing signs of biomass saturation. The future (2080s) biomass will only sequester at most 22% more carbon than the current level. Given such a strong sink has limited growth potential, our ground-based analysis suggests policy changes to sustain the carbon sink.
| S-EPMC6045605 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Plant communities in forest-grassland ecotones of the European Alps are already suffering from gradual climate change and will likely be exposed to more frequent and intense drought periods in the future. Yet, how gradual climate change and extreme drought will affect the stability of these plant communities is largely unknown. Here, we investigated how drought modulates the effects of gradual climate change on the long-term structural stability of these ecotone communities using a multidimensional approach. Using a spatially explicit landscape vegetation model, we simulated three drought scenarios, on top of gradual changes of climate variables, and their impacts on the dynamics of 24 plant functional groups, distinguishing between forests and grasslands, as well as different land uses. We then used n-dimensional hypervolumes to define community states under the different drought scenarios, and compared them to initial conditions to assess changes in community structural stability. In general, added drought effects did not counteract the long-term consequences of gradual climate changes, although they resulted in quantitatively different effects. Importantly, drought and climate change had non-negligible consequences for taxonomic and functional structure that differed between communities and land-use regimes. For instance, forest taxonomic structure was more overall more stable than grassland's, despite the observed functional shifts towards more warm-adapted species compositions. Conversely, unmanaged grasslands were the least stable, suffering the loss of characteristic alpine species. Also, while frequent and severe drought regimes caused forests to become more variable in time, they had the opposite effect on grasslands. Our results agree with observations of drought- and climate-driven changes in mountain communities of the Alps, and we discuss their relevance for ecosystem management. Importantly, we demonstrate the utility of this multidimensional approach to study community stability for analysing cross-community and cross-disturbance responses to global change.
| S-EPMC6200273 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Higher tree density, more fuels, and a warmer, drier climate have caused an increase in the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires in western U.S. forests. There is an urgent need to restore forests across the western United States. To address this need, the U.S. Forest Service began the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) to restore four national forests in Arizona. The objective of this study was to evaluate how restoration of ~400,000 ha under the 4FRI program and projected climate change would influence carbon dynamics and wildfire severity from 2010 to 2099. Specifically, we estimated forest carbon fluxes, carbon pools and wildfire severity under a moderate and fast 4FRI implementation schedule and compared those to status quo and no-harvest scenarios using the LANDIS-II simulation model and climate change projections. We found that the fast-4FRI scenario showed early decreases in ecosystem carbon due to initial thinning/prescribed fire treatments, but total ecosystem carbon increased by 9-18% over no harvest by the end of the simulation. This increased carbon storage by 6.3-12.7 million metric tons, depending on the climate model, equating to removal of carbon emissions from 55,000 to 110,000 passenger vehicles per year until the end of the century. Nearly half of the additional carbon was stored in more stable soil pools. However, climate models with the largest predicted temperature increases showed declines by late century in ecosystem carbon despite restoration. Our study uses data from a real-world, large-scale restoration project and indicates that restoration is likely to stabilize carbon and the benefits are greater when the pace of restoration is faster.
| S-EPMC6916600 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Climate change leads to species' range shifts, which may end up reducing the effectiveness of protected areas. These deleterious changes in biodiversity may become amplified if they include functionally important species, such as herbivores or pollinators. We evaluated how effective protected areas in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest are in maintaining the diversity of tiger moths (Arctiinae) under climate change. Specifically, we assessed whether protected areas will gain or lose species under climate change and mapped their locations in the Atlantic Forest, in order to assess potential spatial patterns of protected areas that will gain or lose species richness. Comparisons were completed using modeled species occurrence data based on the current and projected climate in 2080. We also built a null model for random allocation of protected areas to identify where reductions in species richness will be more severe than expected. We employed several modern techniques for modeling species' distributions and summarized results using ensembles of models. Our models indicate areas of high species richness in the central and southern regions of the Atlantic Forest both for now and the future. However, we estimate that in 2080 these regions should become climatically unsuitable, decreasing the species' distribution area. Around 4% of species were predicted to become extinct, some of them being endemic to the biome. Estimates of species turnover from current to future climate tended to be high, but these findings are dependent on modeling methods. Our most important results show that only a few protected areas in the southern region of the biome would gain species. Protected areas in semideciduous forests in the western region of the biome would lose more species than expected by the null model employed. Hence, current protected areas are worse off, than just randomly selected areas, at protecting species in the future.
| S-EPMC4168255 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Species adapted to cold-climatic mountain environments are expected to face a high risk of range contractions, if not local extinctions under climate change. Yet, the populations of many endothermic species may not be primarily affected by physiological constraints, but indirectly by climate-induced changes of habitat characteristics. In mountain forests, where vertebrate species largely depend on vegetation composition and structure, deteriorating habitat suitability may thus be mitigated or even compensated by habitat management aiming at compositional and structural enhancement. We tested this possibility using four cold-adapted bird species with complementary habitat requirements as model organisms. Based on species data and environmental information collected in 300 1-km2 grid cells distributed across four mountain ranges in central Europe, we investigated (1) how species' occurrence is explained by climate, landscape, and vegetation, (2) to what extent climate change and climate-induced vegetation changes will affect habitat suitability, and (3) whether these changes could be compensated by adaptive habitat management. Species presence was modelled as a function of climate, landscape and vegetation variables under current climate; moreover, vegetation-climate relationships were assessed. The models were extrapolated to the climatic conditions of 2050, assuming the moderate IPCC-scenario A1B, and changes in species' occurrence probability were quantified. Finally, we assessed the maximum increase in occurrence probability that could be achieved by modifying one or multiple vegetation variables under altered climate conditions. Climate variables contributed significantly to explaining species occurrence, and expected climatic changes, as well as climate-induced vegetation trends, decreased the occurrence probability of all four species, particularly at the low-altitudinal margins of their distribution. These effects could be partly compensated by modifying single vegetation factors, but full compensation would only be achieved if several factors were changed in concert. The results illustrate the possibilities and limitations of adaptive species conservation management under climate change.
| S-EPMC4019656 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The rates of anthropogenic climate change substantially exceed those at which forest ecosystems - dominated by immobile, long-lived organisms - are able to adapt. The resulting maladaptation of forests has potentially detrimental effects on ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, as many forest-dwelling species are highly dependent on the prevailing tree species, a delayed response of the latter to a changing climate can contribute to an extinction debt and mask climate-induced biodiversity loss. However, climate change will likely also intensify forest disturbances. Here, we tested the hypothesis that disturbances foster the reorganization of ecosystems and catalyze the adaptation of forest composition to climate change. Our specific objectives were (i) to quantify the rate of autonomous forest adaptation to climate change, (ii) examine the role of disturbance in the adaptation process, and (iii) investigate spatial differences in climate-induced species turnover in an unmanaged mountain forest landscape (Kalkalpen National Park, Austria). Simulations with a process-based forest landscape model were performed for 36 unique combinations of climate and disturbance scenarios over 1000 years. We found that climate change strongly favored European beech and oak species (currently prevailing in mid- to low-elevation areas), with novel species associations emerging on the landscape. Yet, it took between 357 and 706 years before the landscape attained a dynamic equilibrium with the climate system. Disturbances generally catalyzed adaptation and decreased the time needed to attain equilibrium by up to 211 years. However, while increasing disturbance frequency and severity accelerated adaptation, increasing disturbance size had the opposite effect. Spatial analyses suggest that particularly the lowest and highest elevation areas will be hotspots of future species change. We conclude that the growing maladaptation of forests to climate and the long lead times of autonomous adaptation need to be considered more explicitly in the ongoing efforts to safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem services provisioning.
| S-EPMC5159623 | biostudies-literature