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The data presented here are related to the research paper entitled “Economic Analysis of Natural Forest Disturbances: A Century of Research” (Montagne-Huck and Brunette, 2018). Natural disturbances have always affected forest ecosystems, altering or disrupting the flows of goods (wood, non-timber products, etc.) and services (scenic and recreation values, leisure pursuits, clean water, regulation of floods, etc.) provided by forests to human societies. Economic analysis can help private or public decision-makers take forest policy decisions by understanding the causes and consequences of forest disturbances, as well as evaluating tradeoffs in alternative policy scenarios. In consequence, the economic literature about natural disturbances is very rich and diversified. This paper describes a bibliographic database gathering some 340 scientific papers related to the economic analysis of forest natural disturbances. Papers have been inventoried primarily thanks to searches on databases (JSTOR, ScienceDirect, Ingentaconnect and NRC Research Press) using specific keywords and the dataset have been completed by searching through literature-cited sections of papers. Relevant papers have been manually encoded into a database (Excel file) taking into consideration each type of hazard (storm, fire, snow, pests and diseases, etc.) and different economic approaches. Data cover papers published in English from 1916 to 2014.

International audience; Natural disturbances have always affected forest ecosystems, altering or disrupting the flows of goods and services provided by forests. In response, people have had to adapt their economic activities and decisions to take such hazards into account and to limit their consequences. In this paper, we conduct a survey on how economic analysis deals with such an issue, considering the different natural hazards affecting forests. Our database (described in and publicly available from Data in Brief website Montagné-Huck and Brunette (2018)) includes 340 papers collected from 1916 to 2014. This literature review allows synthesizing the existing knowledge, characterizing forest disturbances and identifying gaps in the literature.