Co-author Thomas Pugh, from the University of Birmingham, commented: “Increasingly, forests are experiencing climates unlike those to which they are used to. This can lead to large losses of trees through disturbances like fire or drought. Forests are adaptable – given time, many will change to be better suited to the conditions. But there is no guarantee that the adapted forests will store the same amount of carbon or support the same levels of biodiversity.
“If forests are to play an important role in climate mitigation, an enormous scientific effort is needed to better shed light on when and where forests will be resilient to climate change in the 21st century. It will be vital to improve models of forest disturbance, studying the resilience of forests after disturbance, and improving large-scale ecosystem models.”
William Anderegg, inaugural director of the University of Utah’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy led the project to quantify the risk to forests. Researchers had previously attempted to quantify risks to forests using vegetation models, relationships between climate and forest attributes and climate effects on forest loss.
Dr. Anderegg commented: “These dimensions of risk are all important and, in many cases, complementary - capturing different aspects of forests resilience or vulnerability. Large uncertainty in most regions highlights that there's a lot more scientific study that's urgently needed.”
To aid exploration of the results for stakeholders and decision-makers, a visualization tool of the results has been created.
