Study
Forest disturbances under climate change
Seidl, R.; Thom, D.; Kautz, M.; Martin-Benito, D.; Peltoniemi, M.; Vacchiano, G.; Wild, J.; Ascoli, D.; Petr, M.; Honkaniemi, J.
Nature Climate Change, 2017
A synthesis of evidence on how fire, wind, drought and insect outbreak in forests respond to a changing climate, and of how those disturbances interact with one another.
Disturbance regimes are intensifying across many forest types, and the interactions between disturbance agents — drought weakening trees that beetles then kill, for instance — amplify effects beyond what each would produce alone.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Climate change is altering forest disturbance regimes, with amplifying interactions that make future forest dynamics harder to project.
How NatureHQ reads it
Disturbance is the part of forest ecology most easily left out of a nature page, and leaving it out produces a false picture: forests are not steady systems that occasionally suffer accidents. Fire, windthrow, drought and insects are how many forests regenerate, and the deadwood they create is where a large part of the biodiversity lives. What is changing is the frequency and the combination, which is a different statement from disturbance being new.
- A synthesis, with the strongest evidence from temperate and boreal Europe and North America.
- Projections rest on climate and disturbance models with wide uncertainty.
- Regional variation is large and the general pattern conceals it.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
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Published by: Nature PortfolioPublished in a Nature Portfolio journal.
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-08-30.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-30.