Disturbance Dynamics in Forest Ecosystem Management

Forest ecosystems are continually shaped by disturbances such as storms, fires, insect outbreaks and human interventions. The frequency, intensity and scale of these events constitute the disturbance regime, which governs patterns of mortality, regeneration and species composition. Understanding the mechanisms that drive disturbance dynamics—from physiological stress and structural failure to biotic interactions and feedback loops—is essential for managing forests in an era of rapid climate change. Effective ecosystem management seeks to balance the provisioning of services such as carbon storage, timber production and water regulation with the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. Advances in remote sensing, modelling and field experiments have revealed how disturbances interact across spatial and temporal scales and highlighted the trade-offs inherent in interventions such as prescribed burning and salvage logging. By integrating knowledge of disturbance legacies, recovery trajectories and future climate projections, managers can design adaptive strategies that sustain ecosystem functions, mitigate loss of carbon sinks and promote long-term forest health.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have established empirical links between atmospheric processes and windthrow in tropical forests. One investigation mapped convective storm energy to large‐scale blowdowns in the Amazon, projecting dramatic increases in storm-favourable areas and windthrow density under high-emission scenarios, with far-reaching implications for carbon cycling and species turnover. A pan-Amazon analysis of tree mortality modes has underscored the centrality of a growth–survival trade-off: fast-growing species show higher individual mortality risk, while region-specific climatic thresholds influence whether trees die standing, break or uproot, thus affecting carbon sink capacity. Foundational work on disturbance size distributions revealed that small-scale mortality dominates aboveground carbon losses, yet intermediate and large events account for only a small fraction, so that net biomass accumulation by growth sustains the Amazon carbon sink despite episodic blowdowns.

Disturbance Dynamics in Forest Ecosystem Management publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in disturbance dynamics in forest ecosystem management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Disturbance regime: The characteristic pattern of disturbances in an ecosystem, defined by frequency, severity and spatial extent.

Windthrow: Tree uprooting or snapping caused by strong winds, creating canopy gaps and influencing forest structure.

Resilience: The capacity of a forest to recover its structure, composition and function following disturbance.

Salvage logging: The removal of damaged or dead timber after a disturbance event, often intended to recover economic value.

Carbon sink: A system or process that absorbs more carbon than it releases, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

References

1. Amazon windthrow disturbances are likely to increase with storm frequency under global warming. Nature Communications (2023).
2. Tree mode of death and mortality risk factors across Amazon forests. Nature Communications (2020).
3. Size and frequency of natural forest disturbances and the Amazon forest carbon balance. Nature Communications (2014).
4. Recovery and resilience of European temperate forests after large and severe disturbances. Global Change Biology (2024).
5. Tracking tree demography and forest dynamics at scale using remote sensing. New Phytologist (2024).
6. Natural disturbance impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity in temperate and boreal forests. Biological Reviews (2015).