About this Research Topic

Background

The protection against natural hazards is an indispensable ecosystem service in mountain areas. Thanks to this Nature-based Solution (NbS), for Disaster Risk Reduction (Eco-DRR), costs of engineered technical protection measures can be reduced or even avoided. Numerous studies have proven the high effectiveness of forests in mitigating negative impacts of natural hazards such as flooding, landslides, avalanches, and rockfalls. However, open questions remain on the long-term and sustainable provision of protective services which are expected to be increasingly affected by global change.

Natural forest dynamics and disturbances can result in temporary or irreversible loss of the protective effects of forests, accelerated by climate change. Rising temperatures and more frequent and severe drought periods will lead to shifts in tree species composition, which may impact their protective effects differently depending on the type of natural hazard. Furthermore, socio-economic changes, such as land-use change or the expansion of settlements, transportation infrastructure and tourism activities, may alter the protective service demands on forests. The uncertainties related to these changes impose great challenges for quantifying and sustainably managing this key ecosystem service in mountain areas. This Research Topic aims at collecting recent advances in research to improve our understanding of the effects from the various aspects global change has on protective mountain forests, as individual or interacting factors.

We invite contributions that explicitly address the impacts of global change on protective services of mountain forests. We are particularly interested in articles contributing to our understanding of how temperature increase, enhanced forest disturbance frequencies and intensities, and socio-economic changes affect the ecosystem service “protection against alpine natural hazards”, including snow avalanches, landslides, rockfall and torrential hazards (i.e. floods and debris flow), and their underlying processes. We encourage submissions from a variety of perspectives, including but not limited to:
• Studies on the interactions between forests and hazards as well as underlying processes with respect to global change.
• Research on methods to include these interactions into process-based physically or data-based empirically motivated hazard, risk, ecosystem service or other models and simulation tools operating on different spatial and temporal scales.
• Local case studies and regional to trans-national analyses quantifying and predicting the evolution of protective functions and effects of forests against alpine natural hazards under global change.
• Contributions presenting new and innovative methods or tools for decision support and the economic valuation of global change impacts on protective forests.
• Research from mountain areas outside of Europe and North America that are often underrepresented in the literature.

We welcome papers including observational and modeling studies, as well as review and opinion papers.

Keywords: protective forests, natural hazards, global change, ecosystem services, climate change, disturbances, nature-based solutions

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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