Information about post-disturbance regeneration success and successional dynamics is critical to predict forest ecosystem resistance and resilience to disturbances and climate change. Our objective was to identify and classify post-disturbance empirical research conducted by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) of Natural Resources Canada and their collaborators to provide guidance on future research needs, improving our understanding of post-disturbance recovery in a Canadian context. To achieve our objective, we collected and classified peer-reviewed and non-published literature produced by the CFS between 1998 and 2020 that concerned post-disturbance ecology. We focused on research addressing natural or anthropogenic disturbances, such as wildfires, pest outbreaks, windthrows, forest management, seismic lines, and those that studied processes related to soil, vegetation, fauna, hydrology, and microbial communities. We found that forest harvesting was the disturbance most studied by CFS between 1998 and 2020, followed by fire. Despite the fact that large, forested areas are affected annually by pests, studies on recovery after pest outbreaks were scarce. Other disturbances, such as mining and seismic lines or other abiotic disturbances were rare in CFS literature. Most studies (70%) examined changes in vegetation related to forest management and fire and they were mainly focussed on post-disturbance tree regeneration success. Post-disturbance changes in understory species diversity were also well-studied. Our results provide a geographic overview of CFS research on post-disturbance recovery in Canada and enable the identification of key knowledge gaps. Notably, research focusing on recovery after natural disturbances was underrepresented in the assessed literature compared to studies centered around harvesting. Long-term research sites, chronosequences that substitute space for time, and studies focused on consecutive disturbances are especially important to maintain and establish sustainable forest management strategies in the face of climate change.

Plant neighborhood effects on herbivore damage have been observed in many systems although few studies have assessed the different component effects of the neighborhood (conspecific neighbors vs. heterospecific neighbors) on defoliation. No earlier studies have monitored how temporal scale influences neighborhood effects. We tested hypotheses on resource concentration/dilution and associational effects in the eastern spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana)–forest system over a 10-yr period across different stands including stands dominated by highly vulnerable hosts (balsam fir), stands dominated by a species with low vulnerability (black spruce), and mixed composition stands (fir and spruce). We observed persistent resource concentration effects on the primary host (balsam fir) during the increasing phase of the outbreak in balsam fir-dominated and mixed stands, while both resource dilution and associational susceptibility effects were observed on the secondary host (black spruce) and the strength of associational susceptibility increased with an increase in resource dilution. We did not observe associational effects on the primary host in mixed and secondary host-dominated stands but in stands dominated by the primary host, we observed associational resistance when the resource was highly depleted. Therefore, the complexity of neighborhood effects suggests that future studies should consider the separate effects of conspecific and heterospecific neighbors, as well as changes through time in order to predict herbivore damage in different systems, and provide better preventive and reactive strategies to manage herbivore outbreaks.