In this Letter, the middle initial of author G. J. Nabuurs was omitted, and he should have been associated with an additional affiliation: ‘Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands’ (now added as affiliation 182). In addition, the following two statements have been added to the Supplementary Acknowledgements. (1): ‘We would particularly like to thank The French NFI for the work of the many field teams and engineers, who have made extraordinary efforts to make forest inventory data publicly available.’ (1): ‘Sergio de Miguel benefited from a Serra- Húnter Fellowship provided by the Generalitat of Catalonia.’ Finally, the second sentence of the Methods section should have cited the French NFI, which provided a national forestry database used in our analysis, to read as follows: ‘The GFBi database consists of individual-based data that we compiled from all the regional and national GFBi forest-inventory datasets, including the French NFI (IGN—French National Forest Inventory, raw data, annual campaigns 2005 and following, https://inventaire-forestier.ign.fr/spip.php?rubrique159, site accessed on 01 January 2015)’. All of these errors have been corrected online.