A spatially-explicit database of wind disturbances in European forests over the period 2000–2018

Abstract. Strong winds may uproot and break trees and represent one of the major natural disturbances for European forests. Wind disturbances have intensified over the last decades globally and are expected to further rise in view of the climate change effects. Despite the importance of such natural disturbances, there are currently no spatially-explicit databases of wind-related impact at Pan-European scale. Here, we present a new database of wind disturbances in European forests (FORWIND). FORWIND comprises more than 80,000 spatially delineated areas in Europe that were disturbed by wind in the period 2000–2018, and describes them in a harmonized and consistent geographical vector format. Correlation analyses performed between the areas in FORWIND and land cover changes retrieved from the Landsat-based Global Forest Change dataset and the MODIS Global Disturbance Index corroborate the robustness of FORWIND. Spearman rank coefficients range between 0.27 and 0.48 (p-value<0.05). When recorded forest areas are rescaled based on their damage degree, correlation increases to 0.54. Wind-damaged growing stock volumes reported in national inventories (FORESTORM dataset) are generally higher than analogous metrics provided by FORWIND in combination with satellite-based biomass and country-scale statistics of growing stock volume. Overall, FORWIND represents a valuable and open-access spatial source to improve our understanding of the vulnerability of forests to winds and develop large-scale monitoring/modelling of natural disturbances. Data sharing is encouraged in order to continuously update and improve FORWIND. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9555008 (Forzieri et al., 2019).

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