Abstract
Abstract. Strong winds may uproot and break trees and represent a major natural disturbance for European forests. Wind disturbances have intensified over the last decades globally and are expected to further rise in view of the effects of climate change. Despite the importance of such natural disturbances, there are currently no spatially explicit databases of wind-related impact at a pan-European scale. Here, we present a new database of wind disturbances in European forests (FORWIND). FORWIND is comprised of more than 80 000 spatially delineated areas in Europe that were disturbed by wind in the period 2000–2018 and describes them in a harmonized and consistent geographical vector format. The database includes all major windstorms that occurred over the observational period (e.g. Gudrun, Kyrill, Klaus, Xynthia and Vaia) and represents approximately 30 % of the reported damaging wind events in Europe. Correlation analyses between the areas in FORWIND and land cover changes retrieved from the Landsat-based Global Forest Change dataset and the MODIS Global Disturbance Index corroborate the robustness of FORWIND. Spearman rank coefficients range between 0.27 and 0.48 (p value < 0.05). When recorded forest areas are rescaled based on their damage degree, correlation increases to 0.54. Wind-damaged growing stock volumes reported in national inventories (FORESTORM dataset) are generally higher than analogous metrics provided by FORWIND in combination with satellite-based biomass and country-scale statistics of growing stock volume. The potential of FORWIND is explored for a range of challenging topics and scientific fields, including scaling relations of wind damage, forest vulnerability modelling, remote sensing monitoring of forest disturbance, representation of uprooting and breakage of trees in large-scale land surface models, and hydrogeological risks following wind damage. Overall, FORWIND represents an essential and open-access spatial source that can be used to improve the understanding, detection and prediction of wind disturbances and the consequent impacts on forest ecosystems and the land–atmosphere system. Data sharing is encouraged in order to continuously update and improve FORWIND. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9555008 (Forzieri et al., 2019).
Highlights
Natural forest disturbances represent a serious peril for maintaining productive forests
Results show that all considered plant functional types (PFTs) generally have a higher degree of damage for wind disturbances with small spatial extent (Fig. 4a)
The relationships found for the other PFTs show a stronger link between the degree of damage and affected area compared to needleleaf evergreen (NeEv), over the range with larger samples, as visualized by the steeper slopes of the fitting functions
Summary
Natural forest disturbances represent a serious peril for maintaining productive forests. Studies indicate that their occurrence can reduce primary production and partially offset carbon sinks or even turn forest ecosystems into carbon sources (Kurz et al, 2008; Yamanoi et al, 2015; Ziemblinska et al, 2018) This is critical for windthrow and tree breakage due to strong winds, which represents a major natural disturbance for European forests (Schelhaas et al, 2003; Seidl et al, 2017). In 1999, windstorm Lothar damaged approximately 165 million cubic metres of timber mainly in France, Germany and Switzerland (Gardiner et al, 2010), which is equivalent to about 140 % of the average annual roundwood harvested in the countries affected (FAOSTAT, 2019). In 2018, windstorm Vaia hit the northeastern regions of Italy causing a damaged growing stock volume of about 8.5 million cubic metres
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