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Purpose of Review: Outbreaks of tree-killing bark beetles have reached unprecedented levels in conifer forests in the northern hemisphere and are expected to further intensify due to climate change. In parts of Europe, bark beetle outbreaks and efforts to manage them have even triggered social unrests and political instability. These events have increasingly challenged traditional responses to outbreaks, and highlight the need for a more comprehensive management framework. Recent Findings: Several synthesis papers on different aspects of bark beetle ecology and management exist. However, our understanding of outbreak drivers and impacts, principles of ecosystem management, governance, and the role of climate change in the dynamics of ecological and social systems has rapidly advanced in recent years. These advances are suggesting a reconsideration of previous management strategies. Summary: We synthesize the state of knowledge on drivers and impacts of bark beetle outbreaks in Europe and propose a comprehensive context-dependent framework for their management. We illustrate our ideas for two contrasting societal objectives that represent the end-members of a continuum of forest management goals: wood and biomass production and the conservation of biodiversity and natural processes. For production forests, we propose a management approach addressing economic, social, ecological, infrastructural, and legislative aspects of bark beetle disturbances. In conservation forests, where non-intervention is the default option, we elaborate under which circumstances an active intervention is necessary, and whether such an intervention is in conflict with the objective to conserve biodiversity. Our approach revises the current management response to bark beetles in Europe and promotes an interdisciplinary social-ecological approach to dealing with disturbances.

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.