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...

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Societal, economic and scientific interests in knowing where biodiversity is, how it is faring and what can be done to efficiently mitigate further biodiversity loss and the associated loss of ecosystem services are at an all-time high. So far, however, biodiversity monitoring has primarily focused on structural and compositional features of ecosystems despite growing evidence that ecosystem functions are key to elucidating the mechanisms through which biological diversity generates services to humanity. This monitoring gap can be traced to the current lack of consensus on what exactly ecosystem functions are and how to track them at scales beyond the site level. This contribution aims to advance the development of a global biodiversity monitoring strategy by proposing the adoption of a set of definitions and a typology for ecosystem functions, and reviewing current opportunities and potential limitations for satellite remote sensing technology to support the monitoring of ecosystem functions worldwide. By clearly defining ecosystem processes, functions and services and their interrelationships, we provide a framework to improve communication between ecologists, land and marine managers, remote sensing specialists and policy makers, thereby addressing a major barrier in the field.

Periodic monitoring of biodiversity changes at a landscape scale constitutes a key issue for conservation managers. Earth observation (EO) data offer a potential solution, through direct or indirect mapping of species or habitats. Most national and international programs rely on the use of land cover (LC) and/or land use (LU) classification systems. Yet, these are not as clearly relatable to biodiversity in comparison to habitat classifications, and provide less scope for monitoring. While a conversion from LC/LU classification to habitat classification can be of great utility, differences in definitions and criteria have so far limited the establishment of a unified approach for such translation between these two classification systems.Focusing on five Mediterranean NATURA 2000 sites, this paper considers the scope for three of the most commonly used global LC/LU taxonomies-CORINE Land Cover, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) land cover classification system (LCCS) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme to be translated to habitat taxonomies. Through both quantitative and expert knowledge based qualitative analysis of selected taxonomies, FAO-LCCS turns out to be the best candidate to cope with the complexity of habitat description and provides a framework for EO and in situ data integration for habitat mapping, reducing uncertainties and class overlaps and bridging the gap between LC/LU and habitats domains for 123Landscape Ecol (2013) 28:905-930 DOI 10.1007 landscape monitoring-a major issue for conservation. This study also highlights the need to modify the FAO-LCCS hierarchical class description process to permit the addition of attributes based on class-specific expert knowledge to select multi-temporal (seasonal) EO data and improve classification. An application of LC/LU to habitat mapping is provided for a coastal Natura 2000 site with high classification accuracy as a result.

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