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…