Abstract
Abstract. Severe winds are among the main causes of disturbances in boreal and temperate forests. Here, we present a new geographic information system (GIS) database of stand-replacing windthrow events in the forest zone of European Russia (ER) for the 1986–2017 period. The delineation of windthrow areas was based on the full Landsat archive and two Landsat-derived products on forest cover change, namely the Global Forest Change and the Eastern Europe's forest cover change datasets. Subsequent verification and analysis of each windthrow was carried out manually to determine the type of related storm event, its date or date range, and geometrical characteristics. The database contains 102 747 elementary areas of damaged forest that were combined into 700 windthrow events caused by 486 convective or non-convective storms. The database includes stand-replacing windthrows only with an area > 0.05 and > 0.25 km2 for the events caused by tornadoes and other storms, respectively. Additional information such as weather station reports and event descriptions from media sources is also provided. The total area of stand-replacing windthrows amounts to 2966 km2, which is 0.19 % of the forested area of the study region. Convective windstorms contribute 82.5 % to the total wind-damaged area, while tornadoes and non-convective windstorms are responsible for 12.9 % and 4.6 % of this area, respectively. Most of the windthrow events in ER happened in summer, which is in contrast to Western and Central Europe, where they mainly occur in autumn and winter. Due to several data and method limitations, the compiled database is spatially and temporally inhomogeneous and hence incomplete. Despite this incompleteness, the presented database provides a valuable source of spatial and temporal information on windthrow in ER and can be used by both science and management. The database is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12073278.v6 (Shikhov et al., 2020).
Highlights
Forests are a valuable natural resource that are important for the economy, society, and sustainable development
We found that the absence of a minimum accepted area for elementary damaged areas (EDAs) will increase the area of windthrows by 2 %–3 % on average
It is of note that for tornado-induced windthrow areas, Shikhov and Chernokulsky (2018) found that the Global Forest Change (GFC) data generally tend to underestimate A, with mean absolute percent error (MAPE) amounting for 17.9 %
Summary
Forests are a valuable natural resource that are important for the economy, society, and sustainable development. Forest ecosystems are regularly exposed to natural disturbance agents such as fires, droughts, insect outbreaks, and windstorms. Disturbance regimes have changed considerably in many forest ecosystems worldwide (Seidl et al, 2011, 2017; Senf et al, 2018). Both the occurrence and severity of disturbances have increased in different regions, including those related to forest fires (Westerling, 2016), insect outbreaks (Kautz et al, 2017), and droughts
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