Enhanced structural diversity increases European forest resilience and potentially compensates for climate-driven declines

Résumé fourni par la source

Ecosystem resilience represents the capacity to withstand and recover from perturbations, an important property for ecosystem function in an era of escalating disturbances. Whilst studies relate large-scale forest resilience to abiotic factors, knowledge gaps remain regarding the link to aspects of functional diversity, such as forest structural diversity (FSD), a factor controllable through management. Here we use spaceborne lidar-derived FSD to quantify its role in determining resilience in Southern and Central European forests. A random forest isolates the FSD-resilience interplay by disentangling confounding environmental factors. Results show a positive FSD-resilience relationship in 80% of forests. Canopy complexity is a better predictor of resilience than spatial variability in canopy height. This emergent relationship is explored as an adaptation measure to preserve resilience under warming scenarios, with the decline associated with 1 ∘C of warming compensated by a 10% increase in canopy complexity. The findings suggest that management promoting canopy complexity potentially compensates warming-driven declines in resilience. Forest structural diversity is positively associated with forest resilience in about 80% of Southern and Central European forests, implying that increasing canopy complexity may offset warming-driven declines in resilience, based on an analysis of remote sensing data and random forest modelling.

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