Forestry articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    With over 2,000 newly identified data points, this study estimates 2,525 million m3 of wood fuel removals globally in 2019, approximately 30% higher than previously understood. Global production of wood charcoal is estimated at 70.5 million tonnes, approximately 50% higher than previous values.

    • E. Ashley Steel
    • , Oliver Stoner
    •  & Leonardo R. Souza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Planting diverse forests is widely promoted as a way to counter climate change and improve ecosystem functioning. This study finds that the spatial arrangement of tree species matters: forests with higher spatial mixing of tree species yield greater biomass, faster nutrient cycling, and thus enhanced ecosystem functioning.

    • Rémy Beugnon
    • , Georg Albert
    •  & Nico Eisenhauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large pulses of disturbance have been observed globally in response to climate change. Using Taylor’s Law, the authors show that those pulses were not unpredictable but expected given a strong scaling between mean disturbance rates and variability of disturbances rates through time.

    • Cornelius Senf
    • , Rupert Seidl
    •  & Tommaso Jucker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study reveals that global adoption of mass timber products can expand forestland, increase carbon stocks in forest and wood products, and decrease life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions.

    • Kai Lan
    • , Alice Favero
    •  & Hannah Szu-Han Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Timber plantations in temperate countries are twice as likely to be destroyed by wildfires compared to natural wood-producing forests under similar conditions. The increasing threat of wildfires in the future will threaten global wood security.

    • Christopher G. Bousfield
    • , Oscar Morton
    •  & David P. Edwards

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bamboo’s native structure, defined by the vertical growth pattern of its vascular bundles and parenchyma cell tissue, limits its application in advanced engineering materials. Here the authors show a method that controls localized moisture content to shape natural bamboo into a versatile three-dimensional structural product.

    • Tian Bai
    • , Jie Yan
    •  & Chaoji Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Achieving the Paris Agreement’s climate goals depends on safeguarding and monitoring the permanence of forest carbon stocks, as delays in addressing their vulnerability to disturbances drastically increase mitigation costs and efforts.

    • Michael G. Windisch
    • , Florian Humpenöder
    •  & Alexander Popp

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Carbon markets are key in climate strategies, but only 16% of carbon credits represent real emission reductions, based on a study of 2,346 projects. Reforms are needed to improve the effectiveness of carbon crediting mechanisms in addressing climate change.

    • Benedict S. Probst
    • , Malte Toetzke
    •  & Volker H. Hoffmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are continuing questions on how much investments in land-based mitigation activities could deliver in terms of abatement. This study shows that annual investments of $2.4billion in the U.S. land could deliver abatement of around 80 MtCO2e/yr.

    • Alice Favero
    • , Christopher M. Wade
    •  & Bruce A. McCarl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree functional strategies regulate responses to water stress, but how these strategies scale up to the forest community level is not well known. This study shows coherent spatial variation in community-level trait associations across temperate forests that is linked to temperature.

    • Daijun Liu
    • , Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert
    •  & Thomas A. M. Pugh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest canopy openings may be caused by planned human intervention or by drivers such as fire, wind disturbance and pest outbreaks. Here, the authors present a high-resolution map and attribution analysis showing that planned and unplanned canopy openings often co-occur in European forests.

    • Rupert Seidl
    •  & Cornelius Senf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Restoring tree cover is a prominent climate solution but can cause global warming due to changes in albedo. This paper maps albedo and carbon changes from restoring tree cover to highlight where the greatest net climate benefits can be achieved.

    • Natalia Hasler
    • , Christopher A. Williams
    •  & Susan C. Cook-Patton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree mortality due to climate change and other disturbances is on the rise. Here, the authors use high-resolution remote sensing data, ground observations and deep learning to quantify individual dead trees and potential drivers across California in the year 2020, encompassing 91.4 million dead trees.

    • Yan Cheng
    • , Stefan Oehmcke
    •  & Stéphanie Horion

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest restoration in LMICs can contribute to global C mitigation targets. Here, the authors assess the economic feasibility of forest restoration methods in Panama, i.e. natural regeneration, native species plantings, and enrichment planting, showing that not all methods are economically viable.

    • Katherine Sinacore
    • , Edwin H. García
    •  & Jefferson S. Hall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Protected areas are important for climate change mitigation. Here, the authors use satellite data and statistical matching to show that terrestrial protected areas have higher C stocks than non-protected areas, roughly equivalent to one year of annual global fossil fuel emissions.

    • L. Duncanson
    • , M. Liang
    •  & A. Zvoleff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors find that climate teleconnections modulate ~53 % of the global burned area with both synchronous and lagged signals, and marked regional patterns, with the Tropical North Atlantic mode being the most relevant.

    • Adrián Cardil
    • , Marcos Rodrigues
    •  & Sergio de-Miguel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How land-tenure regimes affect deforestation remains ambiguous. This study shows how deforestation in Brazil is land-tenure dependent, and how strategies to effectively reduce deforestation can range from strengthening poorly defined rights to strengthening conservation-focused regimes.

    • Andrea Pacheco
    •  & Carsten Meyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This research quantifies the role of zero deforestation policies and potential leakages in Brazilian soybean production, the third major driver of deforestation globally. Here the authors provide the first estimates of net global avoided soy-driven deforestation from zero-deforestation import restrictions and find that such restrictions could help avoid ~40% of deforestation for soy cultivation in Brazil and ~2% of global deforestation.

    • Nelson Villoria
    • , Rachael Garrett
    •  & Kimberly Carlson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impact of land-use and cover-change (LUCC) on ecosystem carbon stock in China is poorly known due to large biases in existing databases. Here the authors develop a new LUCC database with corrected false signals and reveal that forest expansion is the dominant driver of China’s recent carbon sink.

    • Zhen Yu
    • , Philippe Ciais
    •  & Guoyi Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Wood used in construction stores carbon and reduces the emissions from steel and cement production. Transformation to timber cities while protecting forest and biodiversity is possible without significant increase in competition for land.

    • Abhijeet Mishra
    • , Florian Humpenöder
    •  & Alexander Popp

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How forests influence cloud cover in different regions is not well understood. Here, the authors use satellite data to show that forests enhance clouds over most temperate and boreal forests but inhibited clouds over forests of Amazon, Central Africa, and Southeast US relative to nonforest areas.

    • Ru Xu
    • , Yan Li
    •  & Bojie Fu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studies from tropical regions indicate that fragmented forests are less productive. Here, the authors report higher growth and biomass in temperate forest edges in North America, and show that temperate forests are more fragmented than tropical forests globally.

    • Luca L. Morreale
    • , Jonathan R. Thompson
    •  & Lucy R. Hutyra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Urban trees influence temperatures in cities. The authors here investigate in spatio-temporal variations in their cooling effect and find 8-12 K decreased temperatures for tree-rich urban areas in Central Europe during hot summers, and up to 4 K for Southern Europe, respectively.

    • Jonas Schwaab
    • , Ronny Meier
    •  & Edouard L. Davin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We combine data from global forest resource assessments with a forest model to quantify the role of major drivers of net carbon fluxes from global forest biomass at national resolution between 1990 and 2020. We find that growth-condition changes, more than reforestation, counteracted forest biomass carbon emissions mostly driven by deforestation.

    • Julia Le Noë
    • , Karl-Heinz Erb
    •  & Simone Gingrich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forests can influence climate by affecting low cloud formation, but where and when this occurs is not well known. Here, the authors provide a global-scale assessment, based on satellite remote sensing observations, suggesting afforestation mostly increases low cloud cover which could potentially cool surface temperatures.

    • Gregory Duveiller
    • , Federico Filipponi
    •  & Alessandro Cescatti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether tropical forest fragments within plantation landscapes are resilient to drought. Here the authors analyse LiDAR and ground-based data from the 2015-16 El Niño event across a logging intensity gradient in Borneo. Although regenerating forests continued to grow, canopy height near oil palm plantations decreased, and a strong edge effect extended up to at least 300 m away.

    • Matheus Henrique Nunes
    • , Tommaso Jucker
    •  & David A. Coomes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest structure depends both on extrinsic factors such as climate and on intrinsic properties such as community composition and diversity. Here, the authors use a dataset of stand structural complexity based on LiDAR measurements to build a global map of structural complexity for primary forests, and find that precipitation variables best explain global patterns of forest structural complexity.

    • Martin Ehbrecht
    • , Dominik Seidel
    •  & Christian Ammer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The nature of forest disturbances are changing, yet consequences for forest dynamics remain uncertain. Using a new index, Stanke et al. show the populations of over half of the most abundant tree species in the western US have declined in the last two decades, with grim implications for how temperate forests globally will respond to sustained anthropogenic and natural stress.

    • Hunter Stanke
    • , Andrew O. Finley
    •  & David W. MacFarlane

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Droughts pose an increasingly important threat to forests. Here the authors analyse a high-resolution Landsat-based dataset of forest canopy mortality in Europe over 1987–2016 to show that drought is already a major driver of tree mortality.

    • Cornelius Senf
    • , Allan Buras
    •  & Rupert Seidl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forests are critical for stabilizing our climate, but costs of mitigation remain uncertain. Here the authors show the global forest sector could reduce emissions by 6.0 GtCO2 yr−1 in 2055, or roughly 10% of the mitigation needed to limit warming to 1.5 °C by mid-century, at a cost of 393 billion USD yr−1, or $281/tCO2.

    • K. G. Austin
    • , J. S. Baker
    •  & A. Bean

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Salvage logging has become a common practice to gain economic returns from naturally disturbed forests, but it could have considerable negative effects on biodiversity. Here the authors use a recently developed statistical method to estimate that ca. 75% of the naturally disturbed forest should be left unlogged to maintain 90% of the species unique to the area.

    • Simon Thorn
    • , Anne Chao
    •  & Alexandro B. Leverkus

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest management may play an important role in climate change mitigation. Here, Tong et al. combine remote sensing and machine learning modelling to map forest cover dynamics in southern China during 2002–2017, showing effects on carbon sequestration that are extensive but of uncertain longevity and possible negative impact on soil water.

    • Xiaowei Tong
    • , Martin Brandt
    •  & Rasmus Fensholt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest soil is known to be a source of the greenhouse gas N2O, but the impact of what is planted in that soil has long been overlooked. Here Machacova and colleagues quantify seasonal N2O fluxes from common boreal tree species in Finland, finding that all trees are net sources of this gas.

    • Katerina Machacova
    • , Elisa Vainio
    •  & Mari Pihlatie

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