0000000000089169
AUTHOR
Tord Snäll
Ten principles for conservation translocations of threatened wood-inhabiting fungi
Abstract Unlike for many other organism groups, conservation translocations of fungi are still rare. Encouraged by recent successful translocations, there is a growing interest in applying this conservation tool to threatened wood-inhabiting fungi. When combined with other conservation or restoration measures, translocation can be an effective measure for preventing further population decline in the short term, and species extinctions in the long term. Translocations can be appropriate for rare and specialist fungal species that occur as small local populations in isolated patches across fragmented landscapes, where there is a low likelihood of successful dispersal between distant host tree…
Choosy beetles : How host trees and southern boreal forest naturalness may determine dead wood beetle communities
Wood-living beetles make up a large proportion of forest biodiversity and contribute to important ecosystem services, including decomposition. Beetle communities in managed southern boreal forests are less species rich than in natural and near-natural forest stands. In addition, many beetle species rely primarily on specific tree species. Yet, the associations between individual beetle species, forest management category, and tree species are seldom quantified, even for red-listed beetles. We compiled a beetle capture dataset from flight intercept traps placed on Norway spruce (Picea abies), oak (Quercus sp.), and Eurasian aspen (Populus tremulae) trees in 413 sites in mature managed forest…
Functional structure of European forest beetle communities is enhanced by rare species
Biodiverse communities have been shown to sustain high levels of multifunctionality and thus a loss of species likely negatively impacts ecosystem functions. For most taxa, however, roles of individual species are poorly known. Rare species, often most likely to go extinct, may have unique traits and functional roles. Alternatively, rare species may be functionally redundant, such that their loss would not disrupt ecosystem functions. We quantified the functional role of rare species by using captures of wood-living (saproxylic) beetle species, combined with recent databases of morphological and ecological traits, from three regions in central and northern Europe. Using a rarity index based…
Future supply of boreal forest ecosystem services is driven by management rather than by climate change
Forests provide a wide variety of ecosystem services (ES) to society. The boreal biome is experiencing the highest rates of warming on the planet and increasing demand for forest products. To foresee how to maximize the adaptation of boreal forests to future warmer conditions and growing demands of forest products, we need a better understanding of the relative importance of forest management and climate change on the supply of ecosystem services. Here, using Finland as a boreal forest case study, we assessed the potential supply of a wide range of ES (timber, bilberry, cowberry, mushrooms, carbon storage, scenic beauty, species habitat availability and deadwood) given seven management regi…
Impacts of forestry on boreal forests : An ecosystem services perspective
Forests are widely recognized as major providers of ecosystem services, including timber, other forest products, recreation, regulation of water, soil and air quality, and climate change mitigation. Extensive tracts of boreal forests are actively managed for timber production, but actions aimed at increasing timber yields also affect other forest functions and services. Here, we present an overview of the environmental impacts of forest management from the perspective of ecosystem services. We show how prevailing forestry practices may have substantial but diverse effects on the various ecosystem services provided by boreal forests. Several aspects of these processes remain poorly known and…
Sectoral policies cause incoherence in forest management and ecosystem service provisioning
Various national policies guide forest use, but often with competing policy objectives leading to divergent management paradigms. Incoherent policies may negatively impact the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem services (FES), and forest multifunctionality. There is uncertainty among policymakers about the impacts of policies on the real world. We translated the policy documents of Finland into scenarios including the quantitative demands for FES, representing: the national forest strategy (NFS), the biodiversity strategy (BDS), and the bioeconomy strategy (BES). We simulated a Finland-wide systematic sample of forest stands with alternative management regimes and climate change. Fin…
High‐resolution 3D forest structure explains ecomorphological trait variation in assemblages of saproxylic beetles
1. Climate, topography and the 3D structure of forests are major drivers affecting local species communities. However, little is known about how the specific functional traits of saproxylic (wood-living) beetles, involved in the recycling of wood, might be affected by those environmental characteristics. 2. Here, we combine ecological and morphological traits available for saproxylic beetles and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data in Bayesian trait-based joint species distribution models to study how traits drive the distributions of more than 230 species in temperate forests of Europe. 3. We found that elevation (as a proxy for temperature and precipitation) and the proportion of conifers p…
Traits mediate niches and co‐occurrences of forest beetles in ways that differ among bioclimatic regions
Aim The aim of this study was to investigate the role of traits in beetle community assembly and test for consistency in these effects among several bioclimatic regions. We asked (1) whether traits predicted species’ responses to environmental gradients (i.e. their niches), (2) whether these same traits could predict co-occurrence patterns and (3) how consistent were niches and the role of traits among study regions. Location Boreal forests in Norway and Finland, temperate forests in Germany. Taxon Wood-living (saproxylic) beetles. Methods We compiled capture records of 468 wood-living beetle species from the three regions, along with nine morphological and ecological species traits. Eight …
Climate targets in European timber-producing countries conflict with goals on forest ecosystem services and biodiversity
The role of increased timber harvests in reaching climate mitigation targets for European countries will be limited if the protection of forest ecosystem services and biodiversity is to be achieved, suggests an empirical forest model driven by future scenarios to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C in 2100.The European Union (EU) set clear climate change mitigation targets to reach climate neutrality, accounting for forests and their woody biomass resources. We investigated the consequences of increased harvest demands resulting from EU climate targets. We analysed the impacts on national policy objectives for forest ecosystem services and biodiversity through empirical forest simulation and mul…
High rates of short-term dynamics of forest ecosystem services
Currently, the main tools for assessing and managing ecosystem services at large scales are maps providing snapshots of their potential supply. However, many ecosystems change over short timescales; thus, such maps soon become inaccurate. Here we show high rates of short-term dynamics of three key forest ecosystem services: wood production, bilberry production and topsoil carbon storage. Almost 85% of the coldspots and 65% of the hotspots for these services had changed into a different state over a ten-year period. Wood production showed higher rates of short-term dynamics than bilberry production and carbon storage. The high rates of dynamics mean that static snapshot ecosystem service map…
Accounting for global drivers in landscape-level assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services
Wood production is a pivotal provisioning ecosystem service of major economic importance, yet its intensive utilization is a key reason for species declines in the EU and globally. A transition from a fossil- to a bio-based economy requires increased mobilization of raw materials from forests. It is therefore essential to find ways to fulfil the increasing wood demand while conserving biodiversity. Wood and various other ecosystem services, as well as biodiversity are produced locally in forest landscapes. However, the demand for wood products is increasingly determined by a global market, i.e. outside the landscape in question. It is at the local level where the trade-off between increased…
An optimization approach for balancing global wood demand and environmental goals on management strategies in Swedish forests
The transition towards the bio-based economy in the future increases the demand for raw materials from the forests. This will increase the extraction of wood from the forests but may adversely affect its biodiversity and other ecosystem services (ESS). The growth rate of most tree species in Sweden is predicted to increase because of changing climate. It will however be counterbalanced by an increased risk of damage due to extreme weather events such as storms. Therefore, it is necessary to develop adaptive management measures that exploit the benefits of climate change while minimizing the damages on growing stock, ESS and biodiversity resulting from its risks. It is further important to c…
Forecast the response of forest birds to climate change and forest management: does citizen science data provide accurate predictions?
In the context of global changes and biodiversity mass extinction, species distribution models (SDMs) are of major importance for conservation and management. In particular, such models can be used for mapping spatial distribution of endangered species and forecasting their response to climate and land-use change. In Sweden, intensive forestry has caused a strong decline of forest biodiversity. Climate change is also expected to cause range contractions for northern-boreal species which are at the limit of their range boundaries. As SDMs require a large amount of data, ideally collected over large spatial and temporal scales, citizen science based on volunteer reporting of species can const…
Data from the study: Strong temporal dynamics of ecosystem services through succession
We used a nation-wide forest dataset from the Swedish National Forest Inventory (NFI) and the Survey of Forest Soils and Vegetation, covering an area of 400,000 km2 of production forests. The inventory uses a regular sampling grid with a randomly selected starting point covering the whole country, with each tract being surveyed once every 5 years. The tracts, which are rectangular in shape and are of different dimensions in different parts of the country, consists of 8 (in the north) to 4 (in the south) circular sample plots. The circular plots have different radii (5-20 meters) to ensure that the variables recorded characterize the ongoing forest dynamics and management. We used only plots…
Land use changes could modify future negative effects of climate change on old-growth forest indicator species
Climate change is expected to have major impacts on terrestrial biodiversity at all ecosystem levels, including reductions in species-level distribution and abundance. We aim to test the extent to which land use management, such as setting-aside forest from production, could reduce climate-induced biodiversity impacts for specialist species over large geographical gradients. We applied ensembles of different kind of species distribution models based on Citizen Science Data (CSD) for six red-listed old-forest indicator species of wood-inhabiting fungi. We tested the effect on species habitat suitabilities of alternative climate change scenarios and varying amounts of forest set-aside from pr…
Habitat suitability models for the Siberian jay (Perisoreus infaustus) from Citizen Science and systematic monitoring data: incorporating information about the reporting process
Opportunistically collected presence-only data contributed by volunteer reporters, so called Citizen Science data, are increasingly available for species and regions that lack systematic surveys. However, it is unclear if or how much the biases in opportunistically collected data influence different habitat suitability modelling methods and hence if they can be used with confidence to address different conservation questions. We evaluated habitat suitability models with opportunistically collected observations against models with systematically collected observations for a forest bird species, the Siberian jay (Perisoreus infaustus) in Sweden. Citizen Science data were obtained from the Swe…
Do traits explain colonization-extinction rates of wood-decaying fungi?
In Fennoscandia, intensive forest use has led to substantial decreases in the amount and diversity of dead wood, which constitutes critical habitat for saproxylic species such as wood-decaying fungi. The transient nature of the dead wood habitat implies that metapopulation persistence of wood-decaying fungi depends on the continual colonization of newly created habitat. Dead wood dynamics in turn are strongly influenced by forest management practices. Very little is known about the dispersal ecology of most species and there are competing hypotheses about functional trait effects on dispersal and colonization rates as well as on species sensitivities to forest management. We test for the ef…