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Forests provide a wide variety of ecosystem services (ES) to society. The boreal biome is experiencing the highest rates of warming on the planet and increasing demand for forest products. To foresee how to maximize the adaptation of boreal forests to future warmer conditions and growing demands of forest products, we need a better understanding of the relative importance of forest management and climate change on the supply of ecosystem services. Here, using Finland as a boreal forest case study, we assessed the potential supply of a wide range of ES (timber, bilberry, cowberry, mushrooms, carbon storage, scenic beauty, species habitat availability and deadwood) given seven management regimes and four climate change scenarios. We used the forest simulator SIMO to project forest dynamics for 100 years into the future (2016–2116) and estimate the potential supply of each service using published models. Then, we tested the relative importance of management and climate change as drivers of the future supply of these services using generalized linear mixed models. Our results show that the effects of management on the future supply of these ES were, on average, 11 times higher than the effects of climate change across all services, but greatly differed among them (from 0.53 to 24 times higher for timber and cowberry, respectively). Notably, the importance of these drivers substantially differed among biogeographical zones within the boreal biome. The effects of climate change were 1.6 times higher in northern Finland than in southern Finland, whereas the effects of management were the opposite—they were three times higher in the south compared to the north. We conclude that new guidelines for adapting forests to global change should account for regional differences and the variation in the effects of climate change and management on different forest ES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abiotic forest disturbances are an important driver of ecosystem dynamics. In Europe, storms and fires have been identified as the most important abiotic disturbances in the recent past. Yet, how strongly these agents drive local disturbance regimes compared to other agents (e.g., biotic, human) remains unresolved. Furthermore, whether storms and fires are responsible for the observed increase in forest disturbances in Europe is debated. Here, we provide quantitative evidence for the prevalence of storm and fire disturbances in Europe 1986–2016. For 27 million disturbance patches mapped from satellite data, we determined whether they were caused by storm or fire, using a random forest classifier and a large reference dataset of true disturbance occurrences. We subsequently analyzed patterns of disturbance prevalence (i.e., the share of an agent on the overall area disturbed) in space and time. Storm‐ and fire‐related disturbances each accounted for approximately 7% of all disturbances recorded in Europe in the period 1986–2016. Storm‐related disturbances were most prevalent in western and central Europe, where they locally accounted for >50% of all disturbances, but we also identified storm‐related disturbances in south‐eastern and eastern Europe. Fire‐related disturbances were a major disturbance agent in southern and south‐eastern Europe, but fires also occurred in eastern and northern Europe. The prevalence and absolute area of storm‐related disturbances increased over time, whereas no trend was detected for fire‐related disturbances. Overall, we estimate an average of 127,716 (97,680–162,725) ha of storm‐related disturbances per year and an average of 141,436 (107,353–181,022) ha of fire‐related disturbances per year. We conclude that abiotic disturbances caused by storm and fire are important drivers of forest dynamics in Europe, but that their influence varies substantially by region. Our analysis further suggests that increasing storm‐related disturbances are an important driver of Europe's changing forest disturbance regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]