Abstract
Recent decades have seen an increase in high-impact extreme events, such as large-scale drought-induced mortality, crop failures, mega-fires, and widespread tree mortality events. Weather extremes have not only concurrent impacts on ecosystems, but can also legacies, through functional impairment or by promoting subsequent disturbances such as fires, insects or pest outbreaks. Therefore, impacts of a given event can also be preconditioned by previous events. Changing frequency and intensity of extreme events under climate change may, therefore, trigger cascading impacts, destabilizing ecosystems and their carbon stocks, thus reducing their climate change mitigation potential.
Quantifying ecosystem resilience to extremes under rapidly changing environmental conditions requires understanding the continuum of preconditioning, concurrent and legacy effects of high-impact events, and separating anthropogenic fingerprints from natural dynamics and variability. This is a complex task, since it requires separating propagating the attribution of extreme weather events – itself challenging – through the chain of multiple impacts, where additional human and natural factors need to be considered.
Here, I will show the compound event framework from climate risk assessments can be adapted to study ecological impacts of extreme events, and support attribution of impacts to human activities vs. natural variability. I will further discuss how changes in disturbance regimes driven by climate change might contribute to a climate-disturbance feedback, currently overlooked in future projections, and discuss its' significance for climate mitigation policies.
Location
ECO-N Seminarraum, Hainstraße 11, 04109 Leipzig or Zoom