Authors: Čada, Vojtěch; Trotsiuk, Volodymyr;Janda, Pavel ;Mikoláš, Martin;Bače, Radek;Vítková, Lucie;Nagel, Thomas A.;Svoboda, Miroslav;

Forest management largely affect ecosystem services and biodiversity. The ideas of considering nature as a template for forest management or “letting nature to do the job” of sustaining functions and biodiversity is present for decades. However, quantitative estimates of various characteristics of primary forests, including characteristics of natural disturbances, are required but rare. We quantified primary forest dynamics including historical disturbance patterns derived from tree-ring analyses on the large network of sample plots in the primary mountain forests of Central and Eastern Europe. We found continuous gradients from small to large disturbance events. Moderate events (25–75% mortality, >10 ha) represented more than 50% of the total disturbed area and their rotation periods ranged from one to several hundred years. These results highlight a need for sufficiently large and adequately connected networks of strict reserves. In managed forest, natural heterogeneity should be acknowledged by more complex silvicultural treatments that emulate the natural disturbance spectrum in harvest rotation times, sizes, and intensities. Disturbance severities rarely reaching 100% mortality, much longer rotation periods, and high importance of biological legacy (deadwood) in primary forests calls for much higher level of tree and structural retention in managed forests including the restriction of salvage logging.