Climate change is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of forest disturbances, including drought, heatwaves, fires, windthrow, pathogens, insect outbreaks, and their compound effects. These disturbances can cause rapid carbon losses through reduced productivity, increased mortality, and reshape forest structure and composition. At the same time, forests face diversifying management pressures: growing wood demand is driving more intensive harvesting, while climate and biodiversity goals are expanding restoration and conservation efforts. Therefore, climate-driven disturbances and management interventions increasingly co-occur and interact, making it critical to understand how forests will reconcile or trade off carbon sequestration, wood provision, and biodiversity conservation.
This session focuses on detecting and attributing forest disturbances, quantifying their ecological and carbon consequences, and evaluating management responses across spatial and temporal scales. We invite studies that combine remote sensing, forest inventories, eddy-covariance observations, atmospheric inversions, experiments, machine learning, and process-based models to monitor disturbance occurrence and severity; distinguish natural disturbances from anthropogenic interventions; quantify impacts on productivity, biomass, mortality, regeneration, and carbon fluxes; and track post-disturbance changes in forest structure, composition, and function. We particularly welcome data-driven and AI-enabled approaches that integrate complementary observations across spatial and temporal scales, constrain model representations of mortality and recovery, and evaluate management pathways and their synergies and trade-offs across carbon sequestration, wood provision, biodiversity conservation, and forest resilience.
The session will connect advances in forest disturbance monitoring, impact attribution, and management-relevant modelling to identify pathways that reconcile carbon sequestration, sustainable wood provision, biodiversity conservation, and forest resilience, providing an evidence base for forest management and policy decisions under intensifying climate and societal pressures.