Natural disturbance impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity in temperate and boreal forests

Abstract

In many parts of the world forest disturbance regimes have intensified recently, and future climatic changes are expected to amplify this development further in the coming decades. These changes are increasingly challenging the main objectives of forest ecosystem management, which are to provide ecosystem services sustainably to society and maintain the biological diversity of forests. Yet a comprehensive understanding of how disturbances affect these primary goals of ecosystem management is still lacking. We conducted a global literature review on the impact of three of the most important disturbance agents (fire, wind, and bark beetles) on 13 different ecosystem services and three indicators of biodiversity in forests of the boreal, cool‐ and warm‐temperate biomes. Our objectives were to (i) synthesize the effect of natural disturbances on a wide range of possible objectives of forest management, and (ii) investigate standardized effect sizes of disturbance for selected indicators via a quantitative meta‐analysis. We screened a total of 1958 disturbance studies published between 1981 and 2013, and reviewed 478 in detail. We first investigated the overall effect of disturbances on individual ecosystem services and indicators of biodiversity by means of independence tests, and subsequently examined the effect size of disturbances on indicators of carbon storage and biodiversity by means of regression analysis. Additionally, we investigated the effect of commonly used approaches of disturbance management, i.e. salvage logging and prescribed burning. We found that disturbance impacts on ecosystem services are generally negative, an effect that was supported for all categories of ecosystem services, i.e. supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services (P < 0.001). Indicators of biodiversity, i.e. species richness, habitat quality and diversity indices, on the other hand were found to be influenced positively by disturbance (P < 0.001). Our analyses thus reveal a ‘disturbance paradox’, documenting that disturbances can put ecosystem services at risk while simultaneously facilitating biodiversity. A detailed investigation of disturbance effect sizes on carbon storage and biodiversity further underlined these divergent effects of disturbance. While a disturbance event on average causes a decrease in total ecosystem carbon by 38.5% (standardized coefficient for stand‐replacing disturbance), it on average increases overall species richness by 35.6%. Disturbance‐management approaches such as salvage logging and prescribed burning were neither found significantly to mitigate negative effects on ecosystem services nor to enhance positive effects on biodiversity, and thus were not found to alleviate the disturbance paradox. Considering that climate change is expected to intensify natural disturbance regimes, our results indicate that biodiversity will generally benefit from such changes while a sustainable provisioning of ecosystem services might come increasingly under pressure. This underlines that dist...

At the nexus of fire, water and society

“…D.A.M. The slide to which you refer contained a global map depicting the geographical distribution of papers addressing the impacts of fire, wind and bark beetles on ecosystem services and biodiversity ( [96], figure 1). Less than 1% of fire research identified by the authors had been conducted in Africa.…”

Forest biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services

“…The maintenance of a natural fire regime is often required to sustain or even enhance the productivity of ecosystems that have coexisted, or even coevolved, with a specific fire regime (Brockway et al 2002). Therefore, the impact of fire on a forest and its associated ecosystem services can be either positive or negative, depending on the forest type, the fire regime, and the ecosystem services (Thom and Seidl 2016).…”

Forest ecosystem services affected by natural disturbances, climate and land-use changes in the Tatra Mountains

“…At the same time, a higher susceptibility of forests to disturbance has been interpreted as a consequence of past land use (Seidl et al 2009). However, recent large-scale dieback in remote natural forests, even at the alpine treeline, confirms the complexity and still rather limited knowledge of the interactions among disturbances, climate and land-use changes that seriously affect ecosystem functions and services (Dale 1997, Thom & Seidl 2016. The emerging conflict between increasing demands and a compromised or limited ES capacity is one of the key challenges for forest management and protection.…”