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Journal Articles Global Change Biology Year : 2024

Recovery and resilience of European temperate forests after large and severe disturbances

Matteo Cerioni
Marek Brabec
  • Function : Author
Endijs Bāders
  • Function : Author
Andrej Bončina
  • Function : Author
Josef Brůna
  • Function : Author
Johannes de Koning
  • Function : Author
Alexander Dountchev
  • Function : Author
Jeroen Engelhart
  • Function : Author
Āris Jansons
  • Function : Author
Srdjan Keren
  • Function : Author
Māra Kitenberga
  • Function : Author
Bohdan Konôpka
  • Function : Author
Martin Kopecký
  • Function : Author
Kajar Köster
  • Function : Author
Stanislav Kucbel
  • Function : Author
Eric Lacombe
  • Function : Author
Lisa Laurent
  • Function : Author
Anja Leyman
  • Function : Author
Emanuele Lingua
  • Function : Author
Martin Macek
  • Function : Author
Zbigniew Maciejewski
  • Function : Author
Francesco Malandra
  • Function : Author
Raffaella Marzano
  • Function : Author
Marek Metslaid
  • Function : Author
Donato Morresi
  • Function : Author
Momchil Panayotov
  • Function : Author
Bogdan Pawlak
  • Function : Author
Ján Pittner
  • Function : Author
Vladimír Šebeň
  • Function : Author
Jarosław Socha
  • Function : Author
Miroslav Svoboda
  • Function : Author
Jerzy Szwagrzyk
  • Function : Author
Nickolay Tsvetanov
  • Function : Author
Carlo Urbinati
  • Function : Author
Patrick Vallet
  • Function : Author
Peter van de Kerckhove
  • Function : Author
Kris Vandekerkhove
  • Function : Author
Jaroslav Vencurik
  • Function : Author
Alessandro Vitali
  • Function : Author
Floortje Vodde
  • Function : Author
Jan Wild
  • Function : Author
Thomas Nagel
  • Function : Author

Abstract

Recent observations of tree regeneration failures following large and severe disturbances, particularly under warm and dry conditions, have raised concerns about the resilience of forest ecosystems and their recovery dynamics in the face of climate change. We investigated the recovery of temperate forests in Europe after large and severe disturbance events (i.e., resulting in more than 70% canopy loss in patches larger than 1 ha), with a range of one to five decades since the disturbance occurred. The study included 143 sites of different forest types and management practices that had experienced 28 disturbance events, including windthrow (132 sites), fire (six sites), and bark beetle outbreaks (five sites). We focused on assessing post‐disturbance tree density, structure, and composition as key indicators of forest resilience. We compared post‐disturbance height‐weighted densities with site‐specific pre‐disturbance densities to qualitatively assess the potential for structural and compositional recovery, overall and for dominant tree species, respectively. Additionally, we analyzed the ecological drivers of post‐windthrow tree density, such as forest management, topography, and post‐disturbance aridity, using a series of generalized additive models. The descriptive results show that European temperate forests have been resilient to past large and severe disturbances and concurrent climate conditions, albeit with lower resilience to high‐severity fire compared with other disturbance agents. Across sites and disturbance agents, the potential for structural recovery was greater than that of compositional recovery, with a large proportion of plots becoming dominated by early‐successional species after disturbance. The models showed that increasing elevation and salvage logging negatively affect post‐windthrow regeneration, particularly for late‐successional species, while pioneer species are negatively affected by increasing summer aridity. These findings provide a key baseline for assessing future recovery and resilience following the recent occurrence of widespread disturbance in the region and in anticipation of future conditions characterized by increasing heat and drought stress.

Dates and versions

hal-04684815 , version 1 (03-09-2024)

Identifiers

Cite

Matteo Cerioni, Marek Brabec, Radek Bače, Endijs Bāders, Andrej Bončina, et al.. Recovery and resilience of European temperate forests after large and severe disturbances. Global Change Biology, 2024, 30 (2), ⟨10.1111/gcb.17159⟩. ⟨hal-04684815⟩
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