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Forest disturbances can cause shifts in boreal vegetation cover from predominantly evergreen to deciduous trees or non-forest dominance. This, in turn, impacts land surface properties and, potentially, regional climate. Accurately considering such shifts in future projections of vegetation dynamics under climate change is crucial but hindered (e.g., uncertainties in future disturbance regimes). In
Forest loss, fragmentation, and transformation negatively impact forest biodiversity and ecosystem functionality worldwide. Improving landscape intactness and connectivity through restoration is critical. Determining where to restore remains, however, a challenge. As an approach for prioritizing restoration areas, we define connectivity forest (CFs) as forests outside recognized high conservation
Accurate evapotranspiration (ET) estimation is vital for hydrological modeling, yet remotely sensed ET (RS-ET) products are often limited by algorithmic uncertainties and sensor biases. To mitigate error propagation and better capture spatial patterns, this study introduces the Composite Efficiency of Absolute ET and Spatial Autocorrelation (CEASA) —a dual-constraint framework that integrates abso
Understanding vegetation sensitivity to hydroclimate factors, especially how carbon and water cycles respond to climate change, is crucial for assessing ecosystem vulnerability. However, the seasonal sensitivity of carbon and water fluxes to temperature, radiation, soil water content, and vapor pressure deficit across diverse biomes and climates remains unclear. Here, we use 196 eddy covariance ob
Vegetation demographic models (VDMs) are advanced tools for simulating forest responses to climate and land-use changes, and are essential for projecting carbon cycling and large-scale forest management strategies. Despite their increasing incorporation into Earth System Models, VDMs differ in their demographic assumptions, with no prior quantitative comparison of their performance. We benchmarked
Disturbances play a key role in forest dynamics globally, with various effects on productivity. Tree diversity is expected to attenuate the negative impact of disturbance on forest productivity, but its overall effect has been little explored and might depend on the functional composition. Here, we analysed whether forest productivity responses to disturbances were modulated by structural and func
Given the severe land-use and land-cover change pressure on tropical forests and the high demand for field observations of ecosystem characteristics, it is crucial to collect such data both in pristine tropical forests and in the converted deforested land-cover classes. To gain insight into the ecosystem characteristics of pristine tropical forests (EFs), regrowth forests (RFs), and cashew plantat
For exploring forest performance in the future, dynamic vegetation models are important tools. Tree mortality is a crucial process in these models, but explicit representations of major agents of mortality have often been relatively underdeveloped. In needle-leaved forest in the temperate and boreal zones, bark beetles are often important for the mortality pattern. The European spruce bark beetle
The 2018–2019 Central European drought was probably the most extreme in Germany since the early sixteenth century. We assess the multiple consequences of the drought for natural systems, the economy and human health in the German part of the Elbe River basin, an area of 97,175 km2 including the cities of Berlin and Hamburg and contributing about 18% to the German GDP. We employ meteorological, hyd
The accurate estimation of soil carbon (C) pool and fluxes is a prerequisite to better understand the terrestrial C feedback to climate change. However, recent studies showed considerable uncertainties in soil C estimates. To provide a reliable C estimate in the grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP), we calibrated key parameters in a process-based ecosystem model (the CENTURY model) throug
Aquatic and terrestrial habitats are interdependent components of the boreal forest landscape involving multiple dynamic interactions; these are manifested particularly in riparian areas, which are key components in the forest landscape. However, this interdependence between aquatic and terrestrial habitats is not adequately accounted for in the current management of forest ecosystems. Here we rev
AbstractDead standing trees (DSTs) generally decompose slower than wood in contact with the forest floor. In many regions, DSTs are being created at an increasing rate due to accelerating tree mortality caused by climate change. Therefore, factors determining DST fall are crucial for predicting dead wood turnover time but remain poorly constrained. Here, we conduct a re-analysis of published DST f
Modeling inland water quality by remote sensing has already demonstrated its capacity to make accurate predictions. However, limitations still exist for applicability in diverse regions, as well as to retrieve non-optically active parameters (nOAC). Models are usually trained only with water samples from individual or local groups of waterbodies, which limits their capacity and accuracy in predict
The European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus L.) is a major disturbance agent in Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst) forests in Europe and it is estimated that a changing climate will result in more severe outbreaks in the future. To reduce the risk of large outbreaks it is important to have methods that enable early detection of bark beetle attacks to help forest managers to prevent popula
Above-ground biomass (AGB) is considered an essential climate variable that underpins our knowledge and information about the role of forests in mitigating climate change. The availability of satellite-based AGB and AGB change (ΔAGB) products has increased in recent years. Here we assessed the past decade net ΔAGB derived from four recent global multi-date AGB maps: ESA-CCI maps, WRI-Flux model, J
Sustaining ecosystem services (ES) critical to human well-being is hindered by many practitioners lacking access to ES models (“the capacity gap”) or knowledge of the accuracy of available models (“the certainty gap”), especially in the world’s poorer regions. We developed ensembles of multiple models at an unprecedented global scale for five ES of high policy relevance. Ensembles were 2 to 14% mo
Energy balance closure is an important feature in studies of ecosystem exchanges of energy and greenhouse gases using the eddy covariance method. Previous analyses show that this is still a problem with imbalances in the order of 0.6–0.7 to full closure (for only a few sites). It has been suggested that mesoscale transport processes that are not captured by the eddy covariance measurements are the
Boreal forest ecosystems are predicted to experience more frequent summer droughts due to climate change, posing a threat to future forest health and carbon sequestration. Forestry is a regionally dominant land use where the managed secondary forests are typically even-aged forests with low structural and tree species diversity. It is not well known if managed secondary forests and unmanaged prima
