The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is facilitating a collaboration among researchers from across Europe to share their geospatial reference records of insect and disease disturbances in European forests. The initiative generated the Database of European Forest Insect & Disease Disturbances (DEFID2), which is freely available and presented in a recent open access publication in Global Change Biology. Forest disturbances are increasing in Europe, but geospatial data describing them are often scattered. To address this, DEFID2 has thus far brought together and made avaialble 650,000 harmonized records of insect or disease disturbances in European forests. They are each mapped as polygons or points in an open geospatial database. So far, scientists from 30 European research institutes are sharing their data via DEFID2. Additional data contributions are welcomed and will be released in future versions of the database that will duly credit all data contributors. DEFID2 complements a similar database on windthrow events (FORWIND), also maintained by the JRC. To read more about DEFID2 and FORWIND, access the data, and contribute your own, check out the JRC forest website or contact the coordinators at JRC-DEFID2@ec.europa.eu.

Author: The DEFID2 team

Coordinators:

Pieter Beck and Alessandro Cescatti (European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy), Giovanni Forzieri (University of Florence)

Advisory board:

Henrik Hartmann, Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena, Germany and Insitute for Forest Protection, Julius Kühn-Institute, Federal Research Federal Research Center for Cultivated Plants, Quedlinburg, Germany

Andrea Battisti, University of Padova, Italy

Constantin Nistor, University of Bucharest, Romania