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Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics

Volume 56, 2025

Climate Change Effects on Interacting Disturbances in Forest Ecosystems

  • Joan Dudney1,2, Julie Edwards1, Brian J. Harvey3 and Rupert Seidl4,5
  • View Affiliations and Author Notes Hide Affiliations and Author Notes
    1Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA; email: [email protected] 2Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA 3School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA 4Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group, School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Freising, Germany 5Berchtesgaden National Park, Berchtesgaden, Germany
  • Vol. 56:393-420 (Volume publication date November 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on September 02, 2025
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.
  • View Citation Hide Citation

    Joan Dudney, Julie Edwards, Brian J. Harvey, Rupert Seidl. 2025. Climate Change Effects on Interacting Disturbances in Forest Ecosystems. Annual Review Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. 56:393-420. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102723-052437

Abstract

Drought, wildfire, wind, insects, and pathogens can interact across space and time to shape forest ecosystems. Although subdisciplines in ecology have long studied individual disturbances, their interactions remain poorly understood, particularly under climate change. Further, inconsistent terminology used to describe these interactions compounds this gap. To address this challenge, we first develop a unifying framework and then review the literature to synthesize climate change effects on the seven classes of forest disturbance interactions. Climate change alters the impacts of disturbance interactions by shifting () the characteristics of disturbances and () the effects of interactions when they occur. Many studies document amplifying effects of climate change, and disturbance interactions governed by nonlinearities and positive feedbacks can be particularly transformative in forest ecosystems. In some cases, however, climate change can dampen outcomes of disturbance interactions, which may buffer forests from disturbance impacts. Critically, climate change is expected to increase the frequency of ecosystem transitions worldwide by amplifying the outcomes of complex interactions, particularly coupled feedbacks and network effects. Although there is strong evidence that climate change is modifying some disturbance interactions, they remain an important, yet understudied frontier in ecology.

Keyword(s): antagonistic effects, critical transitions, disturbance networks, feedbacks, linked disturbances, synergistic effects
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Climate Change Effects on Interacting Disturbances in Forest Ecosystems
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 56, 393 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102723-052437
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102723-052437
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102723-052437
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