Climate-induced cascading disturbance interactions pose a major challenge to the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem services to society. Developing a deeper understanding and enhanced capacity to simulate these interactions is essential for identifying disturbance-induced tipping points in forest ecosystems, and for improving management in response to such changes. This forum paper highlights opportunities to anticipate future forest disturbance trajectories by integrating paleoecology and modeling. Recent advances in forest landscape models (FLMs) and in the paleoecology of disturbances provide novel opportunities for hindcast simulations that account for multiple interacting disturbances. FLM simulations informed by paleoecological reconstructions could be mutually beneficial for both the modeling and paleoecological research communities. This integrative approach would enable the testing of previously unexplored causal hypotheses to explain discrepancies between reconstructed and simulated vegetation trajectories, while also evaluating model performance across long temporal scales and under changing climatic conditions. To integrate paleoecological data into FLMs, priority should be given to multi-proxy paleoecological reconstructions across multiple forest ecosystems to generate the data needed to inform and refine models. These new research avenues may advance projections of ecosystem change, thereby strengthening the scientific basis for guiding adaptive forest policy and management.
