0000000000815073
AUTHOR
Sauli Valkonen
Browsing hinders the regeneration of broadleaved trees in uneven-aged forest management in southern Finland
Uneven-aged forest management has attained increasing popularity. It may benefit biodiversity, buffer against pests and abiotic damages, decrease runoff from clearcuts and improve recreational values. We studied how gap cuttings and single-tree selection cuttings influence browsing damage in spruce-dominated forests in south-central Finland. Overall, browsing damage was especially frequent in aspen and rowan, but also in birch. The larger the basal area left in harvesting, the lower the browsing pressure on birch and rowan; neither the harvesting method nor the seedling density had an independent effect on browsing damage. Although larger tree retention levels may reduce browsing damage, th…
Red List of Ecosystems: assessing the quality of boreal forests in Finland
IUCN recently published guidelines for Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) risk assessment [1]. The RLE criteria include consideration of changes in an area and the geographic distribution of ecosystems but also of changes in the biotic and abiotic ecological quality of ecosystems. In widely distributed ecosystems, such as boreal forests in Finland, ecological quality is often more important than the spatial extent of an area in assessing threat status. Therefore, it is important to find quantitative variables that are good surrogates for the overall quality of an ecosystem. In the RLE assessment of Finland, we divided boreal forests into 40 ecosystem types. Of these, forests with mineral soils (1…