Disturbances of EU forests caused by biotic agents
Abstract
Disturbances in forests are part of the natural ecosystem cycle. However, certain disturbances can lead to the disappearance of forests and in the case of productive forests can cause major socio-economic damages. In natural forests, a dilemma may arise between restoring “naturalness” and maintaining “wildness”. Defining threats and thresholds will be part of the work conducted in this study. Rapid climate change places ecosystems under stress, as the plants in the ecosystems have little time to adapt to changes occurring over a few decades. Scenarios for the near future include a higher frequency of extreme events (e.g. floods, storms, frosts at atypical times, abrupt changes between warm and cold weather conditions, drought) coupled with a gradual increase in average temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns. This type of stress is of particular relevance to forest ecosystems, where the climax vegetation comprises a high proportion of long-lived tree species which cannot adapt rapidly to environmental change or to (alien or native) invasive pests and pathogens. All these factors will seriously impact (alien or native) host-parasite and other pathogen- or pest-host interactions at the tree, woodland and forest ecosystem and landscape levels, through their impact on development cycles and their timing and on increasing abiotic disturbances to forests, leading to higher forest vulnerability. The interactions between climate change, including likely increases in mean temperatures, precipitation and numbers of extreme weather (storm) events, and pests and pathogens (indigenous or alien) will have serious impacts on host susceptibility to attack and a large number of hitherto unprecedented forest health problems are likely to occur in the future. For many pests and diseases endemic in European forests, the climatic and edaphic factors influencing development of problems are known. From such data, it is possible to model how the distributions of these organisms may alter during the predicted period of rapid climatic change. For alien invasive species, however, these factors usually remain unknown and are not investigated until the exotic organisms have already caused major (detectable) problems in European forest ecosystems.
keywords biotic agents disturbances climate change risk monitoring
Publikationen
Project staff
Axel Schopf
Univ.-Prof. i.R. Dr.phil. Axel Schopf
axel.schopf@boku.ac.at
BOKU Project Leader
01.11.2010 - 31.10.2011
BOKU partners
External partners
BIO Intelligence Service
none
partner