Long-term comparison shows protected and non-protected forests differ in harvesting, but not in wildfires or drought-driven dieback

While disturbances are essential for biodiversity, their escalation driven by climate change may threaten forest ecosystems. Contrasting approaches to adapt forests to disturbances—intensifying management versus encouraging natural succession towards more mature ecosystems—have sparked a debate about whether protection influences forests' vulnerability to disturbance. This question, however, has barely been investigated. Natura 2000 network is the backbone of biodiversity protection in Europe. We compared the long-term incidence of harvesting, wildfires, and drought-driven forest dieback inside and outside Natura 2000 areas in Catalonia (NE Spain) by combining remote sensing-derived maps of harvesting and wildfires (1985-2023), an exhaustive ground survey on forest dieback (2012-2023), and forest characteristics extracted from 3,400 permanent plots inventoried in 1990, 2000, and 2015.