One to rule them all? Assessing the performance of sustainable forest management indicators against multitaxonomic data for biodiversity conservation

Bibtex

@misc{600f651f-4393-4df3-b09c-1bbbb69145af,
title = "One to rule them all? Assessing the performance of sustainable forest management indicators against multitaxonomic data for biodiversity conservation",
abstract = "Several regional initiatives and reporting efforts assess the state of forest biodiversity through broad-scale indicators based on data from national forest inventories. Although valuable, these indicators are essentially indirect and evaluate habitat quantity and quality rather than biodiversity per se. Therefore, their link to biodiversity may be weak, which decreases their usefulness for decision-making. For several decades, Forest Europe indicators assessed the state of European forests, in particular their biodiversity. However, no extensive study has been conducted to date to assess their performance – i.e. the capacity of the indicators to reflect variations in biodiversity – against multitaxonomic data. We hypothesized that no single biodiversity indicator from Forest Europe can represent overall forest biodiversity, but that several indicators would reflect habitat quality for at least some taxa in a comprehensive way. We tested the set of Forest Europe's indicators against the species richness of six taxonomic and functional groups across several hundreds of sampling units over Europe. We showed that, while some indicators perform relatively well across groups (e.g. deadwood volume), no single indicator represented all biodiversity at once, and that a combination of several indicators performed better. Forest Europe indicators were chosen for their availability and ease of understanding for most people. However, we showed that gaps in the monitoring framework persist, and that surveying certain taxa along with stand structure is necessary to support policymaking and tackle forest biodiversity loss at the large scale. Adding context (e.g. forest type) may also contribute to increase the performance of biodiversity indicators.",
author = "Yoan Paillet and Livia Zapponi and Peter Schall and Jean-Matthieu Monnet and Christian Ammer and Lorenzo Balducci and Steffen Boch and Gediminas Brazaitis and Alessandro Campanaro and Francesco Chianucci and Inken Doerfler and Markus Fischer and Marion Gosselin and Martin Gossner and Jacob Heilmann-Clausen and Jeňýk Hofmeister and Jan Hošek and Kirsten Jung and Sebastian Kepfer Rojas and Peter Odor and Flóra Tinya and Giovanni Trentanovi and Giorgio Vacchiano and Kris Vandekerkhove and Wolfgang W. Weisser and Michael Wohlwend and Sabina Burrascano",
year = "2024",
month = nov,
day = "22",
doi = "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2024.110874",
language = "English",
publisher = "Applied Science Publishers",
address = "Belgium,
type = "Other"
}

Authors

Yoan Paillet
Livia Zapponi
Peter Schall
Jean-Matthieu Monnet
Christian Ammer
Lorenzo Balducci
Steffen Boch
Gediminas Brazaitis
Alessandro Campanaro
Francesco Chianucci
Inken Doerfler
Markus Fischer
Marion Gosselin
Martin Gossner
Jacob Heilmann-Clausen
Jeňýk Hofmeister
Jan Hošek
Kirsten Jung
Sebastian Kepfer Rojas
Peter Odor
Flóra Tinya
Giovanni Trentanovi
Giorgio Vacchiano
Kris Vandekerkhove
Wolfgang W. Weisser
Michael Wohlwend
Sabina Burrascano