Climate change related largely to high greenhouse gas emissions is a process that is leading to alteration in the biosphere. These rapid changes can induce higher frequency of disturbances and catastrophes, which in turn may impact the balance and function of forest ecosystems. Forests play a role as natural carbon sinks, helping mitigate climate change. Severe, stand-replacing disturbance events can result in the complete loss of forest canopy and a resulting change in function, severe disturbances are well documented. However, it is unclear how forests respond to less severe, moderate disturbance events, in which only a portion of the canopy is removed. In previous studies it was shown that forest productivity was resilient to increasing disturbance severity up to a threshold, in which net primary production abruptly decreased. The causes undermining the suggested threshold are not well understood, subcanopy response may play an important role in sustaining productivity. In this study, we build previous work and ask: 1.Does productivity drop with increasing disturbance? 2. Is there a lack of subcanopy response at high disturbance severity? And 3. Is a lack of subcanopy response related to mortality? We suggest that higher disturbance will limit productivity, subcanopy response may not compensate at very high disturbance and higher disturbance is related to subcanopy mortality