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Forest canopy openings may be caused by planned human intervention or by drivers such as fire, wind disturbance and pest outbreaks. Here, the authors present a high-resolution map and attribution analysis showing that planned and unplanned canopy openings often co-occur in European forests.

Climate change will raise the severity and frequency of forest disturbance, damaging the economic value of timber. Researchers show Europe’s timber-based forestry could lose up to €247 billion, yet in some regions the increase in forest productivity could offset these shocks.

Invasive alien pests can cause large-scale forest mortality and release carbon stored in forests. Here the authors show that climate change increases the potential range of alien pests and that their impact on the carbon cycle could be as severe as the current natural disturbance regime in Europe’s forests.

Analysis of soundscape data from 139 globally distributed sites reveals that sounds of biological origin exhibit predictable rhythms depending on location and season, whereas sounds of anthropogenic origin are less predictable. Comparisons between paired urban–rural sites show that urban green spaces are noisier and dominated by sounds of technological origin.

Large pulses of disturbance have been observed globally in response to climate change. Using Taylor’s Law, the authors show that those pulses were not unpredictable but expected given a strong scaling between mean disturbance rates and variability of disturbances rates through time.

Increases in tree mortality can signal changes in forest health, but large-scale tree mortality is difficult to quantify. Here Senf et al. show large-scale increases in forest mortality in Central Europe over the past 30 years, which were related to increasing growing stocks and temperature.

Droughts pose an increasingly important threat to forests. Here the authors analyse a high-resolution Landsat-based dataset of forest canopy mortality in Europe over 1987–2016 to show that drought is already a major driver of tree mortality.

European forest disturbance—due to wind, bark beetles and wildfires—has increased in association with climate changes, but future disturbance-response remains highly uncertain. Now, research based on an ensemble of climate change scenarios indicates that an increase in forest disturbance is probable in the coming decades, with implications for forest carbon storage.

Species distribution modelling for 69 European tree species under current climate conditions and projected conditions to 2100 (in decadal steps) demonstrates that, for climate suitability to be maintained throughout a tree’s lifespan, many fewer tree species are available to forest managers than are currently used.

Mutations in the costimulatory molecule CTLA-4 in six families are associated with immune dysregulation.

Exploring how biodiversity and climate change are interlinked, the authors show that limiting warming could maintain tree diversity, avoiding primary productivity loss. Countries with greater climate change economic costs benefit most: a potential triple win for climate, biodiversity and society.

Multi-year field experiments across six continents suggest that insects have an important contribution to decomposition and carbon release from forest deadwood.

Climate change may impact forest disturbances, though local variability is high. Here, Sommerfeld et al. show that disturbance patterns across the temperate biome vary with agents and tree traits, yet large disturbances are consistently linked to warmer and drier than average conditions.

Resilience in production forests can be achieved through natural ecological processes or repeated intensive interventions. We caution that ‘coerced’ resilience derived from intense and repeated human inputs may exacerbate biodiversity loss, narrow the range of ecosystem services provided and limit general resilience (that is, the capacity of production forests to recover from unforeseen disturbances).

Species richness across taxa showed U-shaped patterns along a forest development gradient in the northern Alps, which remained stable with elevation. Habitat specialization decreased for all taxa and beta diversity varied across taxa with elevation.

Changes in forest disturbance are likely to be greatest in coniferous forests and the boreal biome, according to a review of global climate change effects on biotic and abiotic forest disturbance agents and their interactions.

Changes in forest disturbance affect their sustainability. This study finds that between 1986 and 2016, 36 million disturbances by humans or other causes affected 17% of Europe’s forest area.