## 1 Introduction  
Forests are fundamental to maintaining ecological stability and advancing sustainable development [1]. Comprising one-third of Europe's landmass, forest ecosystems present significant potential for climate change mitigation efforts by policymakers and land managers [2]. Therefore, the rigorous characterization of the climate-regulating functions of European forests constitutes an essential component of effective global climate mitigation efforts.  
Forest cover dynamics strongly modulate land surface temperature (LST) through coupled biophysical and biogeochemical mechanisms [3, 4, 5, 6]. From a biogeochemical perspective, forests induce planetary-scale cooling primarily via photosynthetic carbon sequestration, which lowers atmospheric CO\({}_{2}\) concentrations [1, 7, 8, 9]. Concurrently, biophysical regulation occurs through three countervailing processes: (1) enhanced evapotranspirationpromotes localized cooling by converting sensible to latent heat flux [10, 11]; (2) reduced surface albedo increases solar radiation absorption [12, 13, 14], potentially inducing localized warming [1]; and (3) thermal isolation by vegetation affects surface-atmosphere heat transfer processes, thereby lowering the LST [15, 16, 17, 18]. Collectively, these antagonistic mechanisms demonstrate that forests modulate LST through multifaceted modifications to surface energy balance and thermodynamic properties [5, 18, 19].  
Forest disturbances, defined as events causing forest canopy reduction and biomass loss, arise from both natural (e.g., wildfires, insect infestations, and floods) and anthropogenic drivers (e.g., logging and forest management) [20]. Within European forests, disturbance impacts have markedly intensified, with windstorms constituted the primary driver of damage over the last 70 years, causing 58% of related biomass loss [21, 22, 23]. The vulnerability of European forests is amplified by intensifying climate extremes, particularly in high-latitude and alpine regions, where recurrent events like snow/ice storms contribute to significant ecosystem degradation, altering the stand structure and species composition [24, 25, 26]. Such disturbances trigger complex biophysical and biogeochemical alterations, including a modified canopy structure, disrupted carbon cycling, and shifts in surface energy budgets [3, 4]. Notably, post-disturbance increases in surface albedo--especially pronounced in snow-covered boreal regions--can induce significant climate cooling via enhanced radiative forcing [1, 12, 27]. This phenomenon corroborates broader findings that high-latitude deforestation induces net cooling through snow--albedo feedback [5, 28, 29]. Despite the recognition of these disturbance-climate interactions, substantial knowledge gaps remain concerning the spatiotemporal patterns of LST responses to forest disturbances at regional-to-continental scales.  
This study assessed the influence of forest disturbances on European LST from 1986 to 2016 using a 30 m resolution forest disturbance dataset integrated with multi-source remote sensing observations. Continental-scale analysis aimed to (1) quantify the spatiotemporal variability in forest disturbance severity (FDS) and LST across Europe over this three-decade period and (2) elucidate the principal mechanisms governing the impact of these disturbances on regional LST.