Abstract

Long-term disturbance histories, reconstructed using diverse paleoecological tools, provide high-quality information about pre-observational periods. These data offer a portrait of past environmental variability for understanding the longterm patterns in climate and disturbance regimes and the forest ecosystem response to these changes. Paleoenvironmental records also provide a longer-term context against which current anthropogenic-related environmental changes can be evaluated. Records of the long-term interactions between disturbances, vegetation, and climate help guide forest management practices that aim to mirror “natural” disturbance regimes. In this chapter, we outline how paleoecologists obtain these long-term data sets and extract paleoenvironmental information from a range of sources. We demonstrate how the reconstruction of key disturbances in the boreal forest, such as fire and insect outbreaks, provides critical long-term views of disturbance-climatevegetation interactions. Recent developments of novel proxies are highlighted to illustrate advances in reconstructing millennial-scale disturbance-related dynamics and how this new information benefits the sustainable management of boreal forests in a rapidly changing climate.

Published in

Advances in Global Change Research
2023, number: 74, pages: 53-87
Title: Boreal Forests in the Face of Climate Change : sustainable Management
ISBN: 978-3-031-15987-9, eISBN: 978-3-031-15988-6
Publisher: Springer

SLU Authors

• Montoro Girona, Miguel

  • Department of Wildlife, Fish and Environmental Studies, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • University of Quebec Montreal (UQAM)
  • Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)

Associated SLU-program

SLU Plant Protection Network
SLU Forest Damage Center


UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15988-6_2

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/128312