0000000000999101
AUTHOR
Anna-maria Eriksson
Challenges of ecological restoration: Lessons from forests in northern Europe
The alarming rate of ecosystem degradation has raised the need for ecological restoration throughout different biomes and continents. North European forests may appear as one of the least vulnerable ecosystems from a global perspective, since forest cover is not rapidly decreasing and many ecosystem services remain at high level. However, extensive areas of northern forests are heavily exploited and have lost a major part of their biodiversity value. There is a strong requirement to restore these areas towards a more natural condition in order to meet the targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Several northern countries are now taking up this challenge by restoring forest biodiv…
Can a species confined to primeval-like forests reach fragments of habitat in a managed landscape?
The Swedish government has taken initiatives to intensify the conservational work at landscape scale. That is, to analyse different needs for biodiversity, and together with different actors, for example the forestry sector, find ways for long time conservation of the biodiversity. Old growth, moist spruce forests constitute an important habitat for a substantial part of the species belonging to the taiga. One of them is the saproxylic beetle Pytho kolwensis, in Sweden considered as endangered. The larvae feed on cambium on newly fallen spruces for about five years. After 10-15 years the log can no longer provide food for the larvae and the adult beetles have to lay eggs in other spruce log…