Article Dans Une Revue Functional Ecology Année : 2024

Forest storm resilience depends on the interplay between functional composition and climate—Insights from European‐scale simulations

Résumé

Tree species composition is known to influence forest productivity, but its effect on forest resilience to disturbances such as storms remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, climate is likely to influence forest resilience directly but also to influence the effect of tree species composition on resilience. In Europe, storm-induced tree mortality is currently increasing across all climatic biomes. Understanding the drivers of forest resilience to storms and its consistency across climates appears to be crucial for predicting the consequences of climate change for European forests. In this study, we used a simulation approach with an integral projection model calibrated with National Forest Inventory (NFI) data at the European scale. We restricted our simulations to tree species assemblages observed in the NFI data, covering a species diversity gradient nested within a climate gradient. We quantified functional diversity and the mean position of each species assemblage at equilibrium on two functional axis: (i) conservative versus fast growing and (ii) low versus high recruitment. We disturbed each species assemblage from equilibrium using species-specific storm disturbance mortality probabilities and quantified the assemblages' resistance (inverse of immediate basal area loss), recovery (slope of post-disturbance increase in basal area) and resilience (inverse of the cumulative deviation of basal area from the undisturbed state). We found that on average, species-rich assemblages had higher recovery and resilience to storm disturbance, while functional diversity improved resistance and recovery. When analysing how this effect varied with climate, we found that diversity significantly increased resistance and resilience in the climatic margins only. Finally, we found that storm resilience was also driven by species mean position along both functional axes. In particular, the conservative-productive axis had an effect two to three times greater than diversity: forests dominated by conservative species were more resistant and resilient, but had lower recovery than species assemblages dominated by fast-growing species. Taken together, these results show that climate and tree species composition interact to control the ability of forests to resist and recover from a storm disturbance through both direct and indirect effects. As such, our findings should help to better anticipate climate change consequences for forest ecosystems.
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Dates et versions

hal-04600576 , version 1 (04-06-2024)

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Julien Barrere, Björn Reineking, Maxime Jaunatre, Georges Kunstler. Forest storm resilience depends on the interplay between functional composition and climate—Insights from European‐scale simulations. Functional Ecology, 2024, 38 (3), pp.500-516. ⟨10.1111/1365-2435.14489⟩. ⟨hal-04600576⟩
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