Data for: Unravelling the spatial and temporal variability of natural disturbances in European forests
Despite disturbances intensifying across European forests, it is not well known how their baseline regimes and trends vary across regions and disturbance agents. Here, we assessed the main disturbance regimes in European forests based on their mean size, severity, and frequency for (i) fires and (ii...
| Autores: | , , , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | conjunto de datos |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2026 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:dnet:digitalcsic_::145cc5633ac90ff04889354414b8bff6 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/431725 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Remote sensing Earth and related environmental sciences Agent-specific patterns Disturbance regimes Disturbance trends European forests Fire disturbances Natural forest disturbances Wind and bark beetle disturbances remote sensing |
| Sumario: | Despite disturbances intensifying across European forests, it is not well known how their baseline regimes and trends vary across regions and disturbance agents. Here, we assessed the main disturbance regimes in European forests based on their mean size, severity, and frequency for (i) fires and (ii) wind and bark beetle disturbances, as well as their spatiotemporal variability. We used the European Forest Disturbance Atlas (Viana et al. 2025) to characterise 3,825,259 disturbance events that occurred in European forests between 1985 and 2023. Using Gaussian finite mixture models, we identified the dominant disturbance clusters (i.e., disturbance regimes) for the two agent groups and quantified the spatial variability of disturbances both between and within biomes (boreal, temperate, Mediterranean). Finally, we compared changes in disturbance clusters over time by splitting the study period into three intervals and assessing cluster shifts from the first to the third period (1985–1997 and 2011–2023), as well as annual trends from 1985 to 2023. We found that fire regimes exhibited a marked north–south latitudinal gradient: severe and rare fires occurred in boreal and temperate biomes, whereas moderate, and large and frequent fires predominated initerr,anean and temperate–Mediterranean transitional forests. For wind and bark beetle disturbances, we identified four distinct regimes: moderate disturbances predominated in boreal and temperate biomes; mild and rare disturbances occurred in Mediterranean and temperate–Mediterranean forests; and frequent and small, as well as severe and large disturbances, predominated in Central Europe and the British Isles, respectively. Approximately 15% of all grid cells shifted to a different disturbance regime during the study period. Fire frequency and severity declined in temperate and Mediterranean forests between the first and second periods (1985–1997 and 1998–2010). Wind and bark beetle disturbances decreased in size in boreal and temperate forests during the same interval, followed by increases in disturbance severity in temperate forests between the second and third periods (1998–2010 and 2011–2023). |
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