Quantifying climate impacts and biodiversity effects of increased forest biomass harvests – an integrated assessment

2018

Increasing forest biomass harvests to combat climate change by replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy may pose a trade-off with climate regulation services of forests and biodiversity conservation. Previous forest bioenergy studies focus mainly, either on effects on carbon cycle or biodiversity impacts (1–3). These studies show that increased extraction of branches, stumps and other residual biomass from current levels decreases the carbon stock and the carbon sink capacity of forests, and has negative effects on species depended on deadwood. Nevertheless, still little is known how climate regulation services or biodiversity indicators respond to a large scale removal of harvest residues in …

Mycorrhizal fungi in wood-pastures

2018

Traditional rural biotopes such as wood-pastures are species-rich environments that have been created by low-intensity agriculture. Their amount has decreased dramatically during the 20th century in whole Europe due to the intensification of agriculture. Wood-pastures host some fungal species that prefer warm areas and are adapted to semi-open conditions, but still very little is known about fungi in these habitats. We studied how management, historical land-use intensity, present grazing intensity, time since abandonment, and stand conditions affect community composition of ectomycorrhizal fungi. We found that the proportion of broadleaved trees, soil pH, and soil moisture are the major dr…

Finnish fungal atlas as a conservation and education tool

2018

Fungi are a challenging organism group to study and often amateurs need extensive help to be able to correctly identify their fungal collections. Fungi could be used for an example as indicators of environmental changes and as a tool to evaluate the conservation value of endangered biotopes. However, all this requires reliable and extensive observation databases on fungi. If citizen scientists are not well enough educated, their contribution may be even harmful due to decreased data quality. To achieve more reliable information of habitat requirements, distribution and risk status of fungi in Finland we started a citizen science project called Sieniatlas (Finnish Fungal Atlas) in 2016, and …

Sustainability for JYU : Jyväskylän yliopiston ilmasto- ja luontohaitat

2021

The power of citizen science and big data to advance fungal conservation: setting the scene

2018

In recent years, fungal conservation has gained momentum #1. Fungi are increasingly recognized as key players in ecosystem functioning, and the need to consider Fungi in conservation is increasingly accepted. Fungi are a megadiverse Kingdom. Molecular tools are improving our knowledge about fungal biodiversity (in some cases with direct conservation relevance), but to be meaningful for conservation we need accurate biodiversity data across space and time. This is an especially difficult challenge in fungal conservation due to the massive diversity, taxonomic shortcomings and difficult detectability of fungi. In this context, citizen science recording schemes and the integration of databases…

Matching compensation sites with potential ecological compensation (EC) actions

2018

Ecological compensation (EC) is the practice of transforming an area to recover ecological functions and characteristics that have been impaired due to the exploitation of natural resources (e.g. mining, logging) and changes in land-use (e.g. urbanization, transformation of the land into farmland). EC is usually done at large scales and seldom times at smaller scales that could involve citizen actions. Our newly launched project "Science embracing art to launch small scale ecological compensation actions" aims to reach out to citizens in Finland to raise their awareness of nature conservation, make them familiar with the EC concept and increase their willingness to get involved in EC action…