What is it about?
Our study is about untouched beech forests in the Carpathians. We tried to understand how natural disturbances like storms shaped them over 180 years. They found most events were small and non-catastrophic, helping forests stay resilient and diverse without major climate-driven changes.
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Photo by Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This study offers the first large-scale, long-term reconstruction of natural disturbance patterns in Europe’s primary beech forests. It provides a rare baseline for understanding forest resilience before human impact—crucial for predicting responses to climate change and guiding conservation.
Perspectives
I find this work important because it challenges the assumption that climate change has already intensified natural disturbances in untouched forests. By revealing a complex but stable disturbance history, it underscores how resilient these ecosystems are—and why preserving them is vital for future research and conservation.
Pavel Janda
Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Large-scale and long-term spatiotemporal patterns of disturbances in primary beech-dominated forests in the Carpathian Mountains of Europe, Forest Ecosystems, December 2025, Tsinghua University Press,
DOI: 10.1016/j.fecs.2025.100358.
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