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Additional informationReprints and permissions information is available online at www.nature.com/reprints. Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Competing financial interestsThe authors declare no competing financial interests. Europe PMC Funders GroupAuthor Manuscript Nat Clim Chang. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 December 01. 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.Natural disturbances, such as fires, insect outbreaks and windthrows, are an integral part of ecosystem dynamics in forests around the globe. They occur as relatively discrete events, and form characteristic regimes of typical disturbance frequencies, sizes and severities over extended spatial and temporal scales1,2. Disturbances disrupt the structure, composition and function of an ecosystem, community or population, and change resource availability or the physical environment3. In doing so, they create heterogeneity on the landscape4, foster diversity across a wide range of guilds and species5,6 and initiate ecosystem renewal or reorganization7,8.Disturbance regimes have changed profoundly in many forest ecosystems in recent years, with climate being a prominent driver of disturbance change9. An increase in disturbance occurrence and severity has been documented over large parts of the globe, for example, for fire10,11, insect outbreaks12,13 and drought14,15. Such alterations of disturbance regimes have the potential to strongly impact the ability of forests to provide ecosystem services to society6. Moreover, a climate-mediated increase in disturbances could exceed the ecological resilience of forests, resulting in lastingly altered ecosystems or shifts to non-forest ecosystems as tipping points are crossed16-18. Consequently, disturbance change is expected to be among the most profound impacts that climate change will have on forest ecosystems in the coming decades19.The ongoing changes in disturbance regimes in combination with their strong and lasting impacts on ecosystems have led to an in...

Natural disturbances like wildfire, windthrow and insect outbreaks are critical drivers of composition, structure and functioning of forest ecosystems. They are strongly climate-sensitive, and are thus likely to be distinctly affected by climatic changes. Observations across Europe show that in recent decades, forest disturbance regimes have intensified markedly, resulting in a strong increase in damage from wind, bark beetles and wildfires. Climate change is frequently hypothesized as the main driving force behind this intensification, but changes in forest structure and composition associated with management activities such as promoting conifers and increasing standing timber volume (i.e. 'forest change') also strongly influence susceptibility to disturbances. Here, we show that from 1958 to 2001, forest change contributed in the same order of magnitude as climate change to the increase in disturbance damage in Europe's forests. Climate change was the main driver of the increase in area burnt, while changes in forest extent, structure and composition particularly affected the variation in wind and bark beetle damage. For all three disturbance agents, damage was most severe when conducive weather conditions and increased forest susceptibility coincided. We conclude that a continuing trend towards more disturbance-prone conditions is likely for large parts of Europe's forests, and can have strong detrimental effects on forest carbon storage and other ecosystem services. Understanding the interacting drivers of natural disturbance regimes is thus a prerequisite for climate change mitigation and adaptation in forest ecosystem management.

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