Climate Change Impacts on Forest Ecosystem Dynamics and Vulnerability

Climate change is reshaping the structure, function and resilience of forest ecosystems worldwide. Rising temperatures and altered precipitation patterns are modifying tree physiology, growth rates and carbon sequestration, while exacerbating the frequency and severity of drought, fire, windthrow and pest outbreaks. These stressors interact in complex ways, driving shifts in species composition, age structure and spatial heterogeneity. In many temperate and boreal forests, warming has fostered the expansion of broadleaved species at the expense of conifers, yet persistent browsing by large herbivores can delay adaptive transitions. Mountain and alpine forests are particularly prone to critical transitions once climatic thresholds are crossed, with limited potential for natural recovery at historical equilibria. Disturbance regimes are intensifying, as insect pests and wildfire increasingly exploit weakened stands, undermining forest resilience and accelerating carbon losses. At the landscape scale, topographic complexity may offer local refugia but can also lead to spatially variable vulnerability. Understanding these interacting processes is essential for designing adaptive management and conservation strategies that bolster resistance and resilience, secure ecosystem services and mitigate feedbacks to the global climate system.

Research from Nature Portfolio

No recent Nature Portfolio content available.

Climate Change Impacts on Forest Ecosystem Dynamics and Vulnerability publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in climate change impacts on forest ecosystem dynamics and vulnerability across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Disturbance regime: The characteristic pattern and frequency of ecological disturbances such as fire, windthrow or pest outbreaks.

Resilience: The capacity of a forest ecosystem to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, retaining essentially the same function and structure.

Tipping point: A critical threshold where a small change in environmental conditions triggers a rapid and often irreversible shift to an alternative ecosystem state.

Hysteresis: The dependence of an ecosystem’s state on its history, whereby recovery follows a different trajectory than the disturbance pathway.

References

1. The interacting effect of climate change and herbivory can trigger large‐scale transformations of European temperate forests. Global Change Biology (2024).
2. Climate change causes critical transitions and irreversible alterations of mountain forests. Global Change Biology (2020).
3. Climate change amplifies the interactions between wind and bark beetle disturbances in forest landscapes. Landscape Ecology (2016).