Ecosystem services at risk from disturbance in Europe's forests

Abstract

Global change impacts on disturbances can strongly compromise the capacity of forests to provide ecosystem services to society. In addition, many ecosystem services in Europe are simultaneously provided by forests, emphasizing the importance of multifunctionality in forest ecosystem assessments. To address disturbances in forest ecosystem policies and management, spatially explicit risk analyses that consider multiple disturbances and ecosystem services are needed. However, we do not yet know which ecosystem services are most at risk from disturbances in Europe, where the respective risk hotspots are, nor which of the main disturbance agents are most detrimental to the provisioning of multiple ecosystem services from Europe's forests. Here, we quantify the risk of losing important ecosystem services (timber supply, carbon storage, soil erosion control and outdoor recreation) to forest disturbances (windthrows, bark beetle outbreaks and wildfires) in Europe on a continental scale. We find that up to 12% of Europe's ecosystem service supply is at risk from current disturbances. Soil erosion control is the ecosystem service at the highest risk, and windthrow is the disturbance agent posing the highest risk. Disturbances challenge forest multifunctionality by threatening multiple ecosystem services simultaneously on 19.8 Mha (9.7%) of Europe's forests. Our results highlight priority areas for risk management aiming to safeguard the sustainable provisioning of forest ecosystem services.

Landscape configuration and storm characteristics drive spatial patterns of wind disturbance in boreal forest landscapes

“…Wind is one of the most important disturbance agents in the circumboreal forests (Kamimura and Shiraishi 2007;Shorohova et al 2011;Ulanova 2000), and wind disturbances pose the greatest risk to the provision of forest ecosystem services across Europe (Lecina-Diaz et al 2024). At the same time, wind disturbance is an integral part of natural forest dynamics (Kulha et al 2020;Seidl et al 2020), altering the structure and composition of forest landscapes (Allen et al 2012;Kamimura et al 2019) and benefiting biodiversity (Palm-Hellenurm et al 2024;Staniaszek-Kik et al 2023).…”