Balancing conservation and intervention: Managing forest diebacks in Slovakia's Tatra National Park

Disturbance regimes inCentral European mountain forests are changing under the ongoing climate change, raising questions about how protected areas should respond toincreasingly frequent windthrow and bark beetle outbreaks. InTatra National Park, amajor windstorm in2004 triggered alandscape-scale bark beetle eruption that challenged long-standing expectations that non-intervention alone could safeguard forest ecosystems. Using the Socio-Ecological Systems framework, wecombined long-term field observations with archival sources and stakeholder interviews toexamine how ecological dynamics, governance structures, and actor perspectives interacted during and after the outbreak. Weshow that warming, abundant post-storm breeding substrate, and legacy Norwegian spruce (Picea abies) monocultures reduced forest resilience and enabled successive beetle waves. Governance fragmentation led to delayed decision-making, allowing large volumes of wind-felled timber to remain untreated and facilitating its spread into high-naturalness stands. In contrast, evidence from other European countries suggests that timely, spatially focused measures can reduce outbreak duration without compromising conservation values. Our results indicate that in disturbance-prone, spruce-dominated forest systems experiencing climate change, a combination of strict protection in core areas and timely, selective measures in adjacent zones is more likely to maintain resilience and support conservation outcomes than strictly passive or fully interventionist approaches.