Increasing occurrence and intensity of forest disturbance events are posing major challenges to forest management in many parts of the globe. Yet the extent of associated economic impacts is hardly known. Moreover, it is expected that a significant share of economic losses from forest disturbance events incurs in the future which hampers an accurate assessment. Against this background, to explore possibilities for the development of a continuous monitoring scheme for economic losses resulting from forest disturbances in Germany, we i) identify individual economic damage components from the literature and categorize them according to the expected temporal occurrence. On this basis we ii) compile a list of assessment methodologies per individual economic damage component and iii) outline the potential timing and extent of incurring economic losses of large-scale forest disturbances with the example of the latest extreme weather years in Germany (2018–2020). Our results show that forest disturbances can result in multiple individual economic damage components that are likely to occur at varying times. In this context, critical data constraints have been identified that thus far restrict the development of a comprehensive and preferably accurate monitoring scheme of disturbance-induced economic losses in Germany. This holds particularly true for the economic long-term impacts. However, our exemplary presentation implies that the economic long-term impacts can constitute more than half of the total estimated economic losses that can result from extreme weather years characterized by disturbance events. Therefore, in order to improve the comprehensiveness and accuracy of forthcoming economic assessments of forest disturbance impacts on national scale, both further analyses on operational level and a standardized and central collection of critical underlying data (e.g. on disturbed stand characteristics) is deemed necessary.
