Do bark beetle outbreaks amplify or dampen future bark beetle disturbances in Central Europe?

Bark beetle outbreaks have intensified in many forests around the globe in recent years. Yet, the legacy of these disturbances for future forest development remains unclear. Bark beetle disturbances are expected to increase further because of climate change. Consequently, feedbacks within the disturbance regime are of growing interest, for example, whether bark beetle outbreaks are amplifying future bark beetle activity (through the initiation of an even-aged cohort of trees) or dampening it (through increased structural and compositional diversity).We studied bark beetle-vegetation-climate interactions in the Bavarian Forest National Park (Germany), an area characterised by unprecedented bark beetle activity in the recent past. We simulated the effect of future bark beetle outbreaks on forest structure and composition and analysed how disturbance-mediated forest dynamics influence future bark beetle activity under different scenarios of climate change. We used process-based simulation modelling in combination with machine learning to disentangle the long-term interactions between vegetation, climate and bark beetles at the landscape scale.Disturbances by the European spruce bark beetle were strongly amplified by climate change, increasing between 59% and 221% compared to reference climate. Bark beetle outbreaks reduced the dominance of Norway spruce (

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© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.