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…