Quantifying disturbance effects on ecosystem services in a changing climate

Disturbances, such as hurricanes, fires, droughts, and pest outbreaks, can cause major changes in ecosystem conditions that threaten nature’s contributions to people (ecosystem services). However, approaches to assess these impacts on diverse services under climate change are rare. To advance such efforts, we build on the accelerating research on disturbance ecology and ecosystem services to develop a functional trait-based approach to quantify ecological, ecosystem service, and economic outcomes under risk and climate change. We demonstrate this general approach by quantifying impacts to ecosystem services—timber and recreational enjoyment—from extreme windstorms in a mid-latitude forest. We find that expected ecosystem service losses from these windstorm disturbances are large and likely to increase with climate change. Yet, we show that common ecological metrics of compositional and biomass stability are inadequate for predicting these impacts to ecosystem service, necessitating more direct measures of services with disturbance. We then illustrate our approach for other applications spanning different ecosystems, services, and disturbances, including crop pollination, flood hazard mitigation, and cultural values. These examples highlight the pressing need to consider disturbances in future ecosystem service assessments, given the increase in mega-disturbances occurring globally with climate change.