Windthrow, the uprooting or stem fracture of trees during high wind events, is a natural disturbance process with both ecological benefits and risks. While it creates canopy gaps that promote regeneration and biodiversity, increasing frequency and severity of windthrow under climate change poses threats to forest carbon storage, ecosystem resilience, and human assets. Globally, research on windthrow has largely focused on Europe, North America, and tropical forests, with recent advances leveraging remote sensing technologies such as satellite imagery and LiDAR to detect, map, and quantify damage, as well as to identify key drivers including wind speed, soil depth, topography, and stand structure. However, temperate Australian forests remain underrepresented in this body of work, despite their unique ecological context. Dominated by eucalypt species, characterised by structurally complex canopies, and shaped by diverse disturbance histories (e.g., wildfire, timber harvesting), these systems may respond differently to extreme wind events. Furthermore, little is known about the ecological and carbon-related consequences of windthrow in these forests, limiting predictive capacity for future disturbance regimes.
This research addresses these gaps by investigating the drivers and impacts of windthrow across temperate Australian forest landscapes. By integrating geospatial analysis of remote sensing datasets with field-based validation, the project will characterise spatial patterns of windthrow, assess the relative influence of environmental and structural factors, and quantify ecological consequences such as changes in carbon stocks and canopy dynamics. The findings will provide new insights into windthrow processes in Australian forests, enhance capacity to assess risks under a changing climate, and inform strategies for sustainable forest management and resilience planning.
Project timeline: 03/2025 – 09/2028