Hotspots in cold climate: Conservation value of woodland key habitats in boreal forests

The concept of Woodland Key Habitats (WKH, small-scaled presumed hotspots of biodiversity) has become an essential component of biodiversity conservation in Fennoscandian and Baltic forests. There have been debates over the importance of WKHs in relation to the conservation of biodiversity in production forests. We applied a systematic review protocol and meta-analysis to summarize knowledge on comparisons of biodiversity qualities, such as dead wood and species richness, between WKHs and production forests in relevant countries. We also summarized the knowledge on the impact of edge effects by comparing WKHs surrounded by production forests to WKHs surrounded by clear cuts. Studies had bee…

Flawed Meta-Analysis of Biodiversity Effects of Forest Management

It appears that the negative effect of forest managementon biodiversity has become an axiom. Whether the neg-ative effect, however, is a fact based on solid empiricalevidence is not self-evident. Most of the studies that ad-dress the issue suffer from a lack of geographic extentand taxonomic narrowness. Therefore, a synthesis draw-ing together results from the individual studies is direlyneeded. In their recent paper, Paillet et al. (2010) rise tothis challenge and present a formal pan-European meta-analysis of data from 49 papers representing 120 indi-vidual comparisons across 10 taxonomic groups. Theirsynthesis has the potential to be a landmark paper inecological research, but also to af…

Woodland key habitats in northern Europe: concepts, inventory and protection

Abstract The woodland key habitat (WKH) concept has become an essential instrument in biodiversity-orientated forest management in northern Europe. The philosophy behind the concept is basically the same in all of the countries: to conserve the biodiversity of production landscapes by preserving small habitat patches that are supposed to be particularly valuable. This article reviews the definitions, inventories and implementation processes of WKHs in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Sweden and the Baltic countries have similar WKH models, while the models in Finland and Norway are clearly deviating. Depending on the country, the definitions emphasize different factor…

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Woodland key habitats : a key to effective conservation of forest biodiversity?

Are woodland key habitats biodiversity hotspots in boreal forests?

Background: The concept of Woodland Key Habitats (WKH, small-scaled presumed hotspots of biodiversity) has become an essential component of forest management in Fennoscandian and Baltic countries. There have been debates over the importance of WKHs in relation to production forests, and several research projects have focused on differences in biodiversity between the two. Results have been contradictory, and thus there is a need to summarize and clarify the existing knowledge. - Objectives: Our objective was to summarize knowledge on comparisons of several biodiversity qualities between WKHs and production forests in relevant countries i.e. the countries where WKH concept has been implement…