The value of biodiversity.

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…

Forest multifunctionality is not resilient to intensive forestry

AbstractThere is ample evidence that intensive management of ecosystems causes declines in biodiversity as well as in multiple ecosystem services, i.e., in multifunctionality. However, less is known about the permanence and reversibility of these responses. To gain insight into whether multifunctionality can be sustained under intensive management, we developed a framework building on the concept of resilience: a system’s ability to avoid displacement and to return or transform to a desired state. We applied it to test the ability of forest multifunctionality to persist during and recover from intensive management for timber production in a boreal forest. Using forest growth simulations and…

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…