0000000000222584
AUTHOR
Jörg Müller
Fungal Community Development in Decomposing Fine Deadwood Is Largely Affected by Microclimate
Fine woody debris (FWD) represents the majority of the deadwood stock in managed forests and serves as an important biodiversity hotspot and refuge for many organisms, including deadwood fungi. Wood decomposition in forests, representing an important input of nutrients into forest soils, is mainly driven by fungal communities that undergo continuous changes during deadwood decomposition. However, while the assembly processes of fungal communities in long-lasting coarse woody debris have been repeatedly explored, similar information for the more ephemeral habitat of fine deadwood is missing. Here, we followed the fate of FWD of Fagus sylvatica and Abies alba in a Central European forest to d…
Dispersal ecology of deadwood organisms and connectivity conservation
Limited knowledge of dispersal for most organisms hampers effective connectivity conservation in fragmented landscapes. In forest ecosystems, deadwood-dependent organisms (i.e., saproxylics) are negatively affected by forest management and degradation globally. We reviewed empirically established dispersal ecology of saproxylic insects and fungi. We focused on direct studies (e.g., mark-recapture, radiotelemetry), field experiments, and population genetic analyses. We found 2 somewhat opposite results. Based on direct methods and experiments, dispersal is limited to within a few kilometers, whereas genetic studies showed little genetic structure over tens of kilometers, which indicates long…
Mapping a ‘cryptic kingdom’: Performance of lidar derived environmental variables in modelling the occurrence of forest fungi
Abstract Fungi are crucial to forest ecosystem function and provide important provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services. As major contributors to biomass decomposition, fungi are important to forest biogeochemical cycling and maintenance of vertebrate animal diversity. Many forest plant species live in a symbiotic relationship with a fungal partner that helps a host plant to acquire nutrients and water. In addition, edible fungi are recreationally as well as economically valuable. However, most fungi live in very cryptic locations (e.g. in soils and interior plant tissues) and are only visible when their ephemeral fruiting bodies are produced, making fungal occur…
Assessment of ecosystem integrity and service gradients across Europe using the LTER Europe network
Better integration of knowledge from ecological, social and economic science is necessary to advance the understanding and modelling of socio-ecological systems. To model ecosystem integrity (EI) and ecosystem services (ES) at the landscape scale, assessment matrices are commonly used. These matrices assign capacities to provide different services to different land cover types. We revised such an existing matrix and examined the regional heterogeneity in EI and ES provision in Europe and searched for spatial gradients in their provision to elucidate their suitability for large-scale EI and ES mapping in Europe. Overall, 28 sites belonging to the Long-Term Ecological Research network in Euro…
Dispersal ecology of deadwood organisms and connectivity conservation
Limited knowledge of dispersal for most organisms hampers effective connectivity conservation in fragmented landscapes. In forest ecosystems, deadwood‐dependent organisms (i.e., saproxylics) are negatively affected by forest management and degradation globally. We reviewed empirically established dispersal ecology of saproxylic insects and fungi. We focused on direct studies (e.g., mark‐recapture, radiotelemetry), field experiments, and population genetic analyses. We found 2 somewhat opposite results. Based on direct methods and experiments, dispersal is limited to within a few kilometers, whereas genetic studies showed little genetic structure over tens of kilometers, which indicates long…
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…
BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene
Abstract Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Main types of variables included The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, th…
A synthesis of multi-taxa management experiments to guide forest biodiversity conservation in Europe
Most European forests are used for timber production. Given the limited extent of unmanaged (and especially primary) forests, it is essential to include commercial forests in the conservation of forest biodiversity. In order to develop ecologically sustainable forest management practices, it is important to understand the management impacts on forest-dwelling organisms. Experiments allow testing the effects of alternative management strategies, and monitoring of multiple taxa informs us on the response range across forest-dwelling organisms. To provide a representative picture of the currently available information, metadata on 28 multi-taxa forest management experiments were collected from…
Integrative nature conservation strategies for wood production and biodiversity conservation
The importance of beta-diversity in European forest requires concepts considering a wide range of set-aside elements ranging from single trees or logs to large strictly protected areas. A successful combination of such elements in a country wide strategy requires knowledge on the importance of spatial scales, mechanisms from a landscape ecology perspective, on population dynamics and on ecological mechanisms responsible for locally diverse communities. Survey data often are blurred by too many confounding variables, which call for experimental approaches. Here I will present results from continental wide survey data and local experiments, answering some key questions how forests habitats ca…
Introduction – Does nature best manage itself or do protected areas need active conservation?
A traditional approach to limit impacts of forestry on biodiversity is to set aside forests of conservation value. Many set-asides are relatively untouched, but some have a history of disturbances; wildfires, forest grazing, coppicing or small-scale felling. Such areas may gradually lose their value for biodiversity conservation unless the disturbances are re-introduced or managed otherwise. On the other hand, many currently protected forests have a history of commercial management, and may lack important characteristics of natural forests. Some of these lost features, can be brought back by active management faster than they would recover naturally. Recently, interest in active management …
How much is enough – estimating set-aside areas in naturally disturbed forests
The amount of naturally disturbed forests in the Northern Hemisphere has increased as a consequence of global change. Natural disturbances, such as wildfires, windstorms and insect outbreaks affect billions of trees and cause significant economic losses. Post-disturbance logging is a common practice globally to 'salvage' some of these economic returns. However, salvage logging can have negative effects on ecosystem functioning and biodiversity. Those taxa, which depend on deadwood (i.e. saproxylic), are most affected. Hence, scientists increasingly encourage the retention of disturbance-affected areas as a main tool to omit the negative effects of salvage logging on biodiversity. However, t…
Biodiversity and ecosystem services in forest - the ‘BioHolz’ project
Whenever a tree dies, it makes room for millions of organisms contributing to the crucial ecosystem process of decomposition. The diversity of saproxylic organisms, which are depending in at least some stage of their life on decaying wood, comprises about one third of all forest species. Forest management in Europe of the last centuries changed forest structures and in particular reduced the amount of available dead wood, which is mirrored by the current extinction risk of saproxylic species1. However, society expects a forest to be a multi-functional ecosystem, which provides, among others, timber, recreation and biodiversity conservation. In the trans-disciplinary project ‘BioHolz’, we tr…
Integrative forest management can promote biodiversity
Integrative conservation strategies that combine production of commodities and conservation, are considered as a valuable tool to promote biodiversity in unprotected areas. In forests, a considerable proportion of biodiversity is dependent on deadwood structures, and an enrichment of deadwood is often proposed as important integrative conservation measure. The Bavarian State Forestry in Germany has implemented an integrative nature conservation strategy where the key element is the enrichment of deadwood during harvests. Deadwood is accumulated by leaving large and small diameter wood usually sold as firewood (discolored stems, crowns) after harvest combined with a retention of naturally de…
Fostering deadwood enrichment in managed forests – The importance of tree species and sun exposure for saproxylic species
Central European forests have been shaped by more than 2000 years of human exploitation. During this time, the increasing requirement of timber led to significant structural changes within the ecosystem. Because of declining deadwood amounts, numerous saproxylic species become extinct or threatened. Yet, various strategies of deadwood enrichment have been developed since the 1990th mainly focused on a quantitative increase. As recently shown, also microclimate and tree species are important drivers of saproxylic communities. However, it remains unclear how active forest management can increase deadwood most efficiently. For this study, we exposed a total of 108 logs of six common tree speci…
How does manipulation of dead wood affect forest biodiversity? - A systematic review
Dead wood (DW) provides a critical habitat for thousands of wood-dependent (saproxylic) species in forests. However, intensification of forest management has heavily reduced the amount and diversity of DW. This has resulted in many saproxylic species being threatened and has caused a situation where interventions aiming at increasing DW might be necessary to support its associated biodiversity. Examples of such interventions include felling, girdling, creation of high stumps, leaving of crowns, logs and trees during harvest operations, and restoration burnings. Although the evidence base on how effective different interventions aiming at increasing DW volumes grows, there is a lack of revie…