Helping society to mitigate logging impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services of burned forests

Over the last decades, an average of 213,000 ha of European forest has been affected by fire every year, with 90% of this area corresponding to Mediterranean countries. The timber of the burned forests is harvested by clearcutting over large areas. Whole trees are then chipped to be used as bioenergy, so that very little coarse woody debris remains in the ecosystem. In recent years, scientific evidence has shown the strong impact that these practices of “salvage logging” have on the soil, the ecosystem regeneration and the conservation of biodiversity. Academic debate is therefore centered in the convenience of harvesting burnt forests based on the trade-off between environmental impacts an…