During the last eleven years an unusual number of intensive gales, originating in the low-pressure systems Vivian, Wiebke, Anatol and Lothar have hit Central and Western Europe and devastated large forest areas. More generally, over the past three decades there has been a worldwide increase in the number of severe natural disasters - especially storms - and in the amount of damage they caused. With respect to global climate changes some meteorologists and reinsurance companies predicted a further increase of severe storms and windthrow in Eurasia (see Lässig & Mochalov 2000*).
For Russia there is no information available on the frequency of severe natural disasters occurring before the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s a number of storms with high speeds have devastated large forests in the Ural region. After these events and with the global warming over the past hundred years, there were fears of increasing storm frequency in this region. Russian forest managers and scientists expect that global climate changes, in general, will have negative effects on the age structure of the Ural forests and will therefore affect sustainable timber production as well as forest management. To test this hypothesis thoroughly a joint project on frequency and dimensions of storm events and their effects on Ural boreal forests was started in 1994.