Institution: | 1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy;2. European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy;3. Arcadia SIT, Ispra, Italy;4. DRACONES Research Group, Universidad de León, León, Spain
Sustainable Forestry and Environmental Management Unit, University of Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, Spain;5. Ufficio Pianificazione Forestale, Amministrazione Provincia Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy;6. National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry “Marin Drăcea” (INCDS), Voluntari, Romania;7. Department of Biogeochemical Processes, Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany;8. National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry “Marin Drăcea” (INCDS), Craiova, Romania;9. University Forest Enterprise Masaryk Forest Křtiny, Mendel University in Brno, Brno, Czech Republic;10. Applied Ecology Laboratory, Forestry Faculty, “Ștefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, Suceava, Romania;11. Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analytics Division, GMV, Madrid, Spain;12. Department of Forest Engineering, University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain;13. Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible (IAS), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Córdoba, Spain
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT), The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia;14. Department of Geomorphology-Pedology-Geomatics, Faculty of Geography, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania;15. Sustainable Forestry and Environmental Management Unit, University of Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, Spain;16. School of Forest Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland;17. Czechglobe—Global Change Research Institute, CAS, Brno, Czech Republic
Ústav pro hospodářskou úpravu lesů—Forest Management Institute (FMI), Brno-Žabovřesky, Czech Republic;18. CREA Research Centre for Plant Protection and Certification, Florence, Italy;19. Laboratori de Sanitat Forestal, Servei d'Ordenació i Gestió Forestal, Conselleria d'Agricultura, Desenvolupament Rural, Emergència Climàtica i Transició Ecològica, Generalitat Valenciana, Valencia, Spain;20. National Forest Centre, Forest Research Institute, Zvolen, Slovakia;21. Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden;22. National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry “Marin Drăcea” (INCDS), Brașov, Romania;23. Department of Forest Management and Applied Geoinformatics, Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, Mendel University in Brno, Brno, Czech Republic;24. Department of Land Change Science, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland;25. Swiss Forest Protection, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland;26. DAFNAE-Entomology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy;27. Research Station Tatra National Park, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia |
Abstract: | Insect and disease outbreaks in forests are biotic disturbances that can profoundly alter ecosystem dynamics. In many parts of the world, these disturbance regimes are intensifying as the climate changes and shifts the distribution of species and biomes. As a result, key forest ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, regulation of water flows, wood production, protection of soils, and the conservation of biodiversity, could be increasingly compromised. Despite the relevance of these detrimental effects, there are currently no spatially detailed databases that record insect and disease disturbances on forests at the pan-European scale. Here, we present the new Database of European Forest Insect and Disease Disturbances (DEFID2). It comprises over 650,000 harmonized georeferenced records, mapped as polygons or points, of insects and disease disturbances that occurred between 1963 and 2021 in European forests. The records currently span eight different countries and were acquired through diverse methods (e.g., ground surveys, remote sensing techniques). The records in DEFID2 are described by a set of qualitative attributes, including severity and patterns of damage symptoms, agents, host tree species, climate-driven trigger factors, silvicultural practices, and eventual sanitary interventions. They are further complemented with a satellite-based quantitative characterization of the affected forest areas based on Landsat Normalized Burn Ratio time series, and damage metrics derived from them using the LandTrendr spectral–temporal segmentation algorithm (including onset, duration, magnitude, and rate of the disturbance), and possible interactions with windthrow and wildfire events. The DEFID2 database is a novel resource for many large-scale applications dealing with biotic disturbances. It offers a unique contribution to design networks of experiments, improve our understanding of ecological processes underlying biotic forest disturbances, monitor their dynamics, and enhance their representation in land-climate models. Further data sharing is encouraged to extend and improve the DEFID2 database continuously. The database is freely available at https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/FOREST/DISTURBANCES/DEFID2/ . |