The influence of land abandonment on forest disturbance regimes: a global review

Abstract

Context: Since the nineteenth century, rural areas have experienced progressive abandonment mostly due to socioeconomic changes, with direct and indirect effects on forest disturbance regimes occurring in these human-dominated landscapes. The role of land abandonment in modifying disturbance regimes has been highlighted for some types of disturbances, albeit being still somewhat overlooked compared to climate change. Objectives: This literature review is aimed at highlighting the most relevant effects of land abandonment and land-use legacy on the regime of different types of forest disturbances, providing insight into land-use change/disturbances interactions. Methods: We searched in the Scopus and Web of Science databases for relevant studies at the global scale dealing with eight major natural disturbances: avalanche, flooding, herbivory, insect outbreak, landslide, rockfall, wildfire and windthrow. We classified papers into five relevance classes, with the highest score (4) assigned to studies quantitatively measuring the interactions between abandonment dynamics and disturbance regimes. Results: Most papers focused on wildfires in Mediterranean Europe in the twentieth century, where landscape homogenisation and fuel build-up contributed to worsening their frequency, size and severity. Dense forests developed following land abandonment instead exert inhibiting effects toward mass movements such as avalanches, rockfalls and landslides. Regarding the other investigated disturbances, we found only a few studies presenting site-specific and partly contrasting effects. Conclusions: Land abandonment triggers ecological processes at the landscape scale, altering land cover patterns and vegetation communities, which in turn affect disturbance regimes. Implications for land and resource management mostly depend on the stage at which post-abandonment secondary succession has developed.