Climate change will drive increasing forest disturbances across Europe throughout the next century

(Press-News.org) Across Europe, climate-driven forest disturbances, such as wildfires and insect outbreaks, are expected to increase over the next century, according to a new large-scale modeling study, substantially altering forested landscapes continent-wide. Global forests are increasingly shaped by climate-driven disturbances, such as wildfires, storms, and insect outbreaks, resulting in large pulses of tree mortality. These events can have profound impacts on forest landscapes and biodiversity with long-lasting environmental and socio-economic consequences. However, predicting future disturbances is difficult because forest systems contain complex feedbacks that interact with one another in highly dynamic ways. As a result of these complex interactions and feedbacks, accurate, large-scale projections of future forest disturbance patterns are greatly lacking. To anticipate how Europe’s forests may change this century, Marc Grünig and colleagues used high-resolution satellite images from the Landsat satellite to develop a deep learning-based modeling framework that accounts for the interplay between climate change, forest growth, and interacting disturbances. Using the model, Grünig et al. simulated changes in forest disturbance rates and tree mortality across Europe in the 21st century under three climate change scenarios. They found that disturbance-induced tree mortality across the continent will likely intensify under all climate scenarios. Notably, disturbances are projected to reach unprecedented levels in the latter half of the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. According to the authors, wildfire is the dominant driver of disturbance-induced mortality, particularly in dry Mediterranean regions, but also in areas where fire has historically been less common. What’s more, bark beetle outbreaks are another major force, especially in temperate central European regions, where warmer and drier conditions accelerate the life cycle of beetles and weaken tree defenses.

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