Thorn, Simon and Chao, Anne and Georgiev, Kostadin B. and Mueller, Joerg and Baessler, Claus and Campbell, John L. and Castro, Jorge and Chen, Yan-Han and Choi, Chang-Yong and Cobb, Tyler P. and Donato, Daniel C. and Durska, Ewa and Macdonald, Ellen and Feldhaar, Heike and Fontaine, Joseph B. and Fornwalt, Paula J. and Hernandez, Raquel Maria Hernandez and Hutto, Richard L. and Koivula, Matti and Lee, Eun-Jae and Lindenmayer, David and Mikusinski, Grzegorz and Obrist, Martin K. and Perlik, Michal and Rost, Josep and Waldron, Kaysandra and Wermelinger, Beat and Weiss, Ingmar and Zmihorski, Michal and Leverkus, Alexandro B.
(2020).
Estimating retention benchmarks for salvage logging to protect biodiversity.
Nature Communications. 11
, 4762
[Research article]
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Abstract
Forests are increasingly affected by natural disturbances. Subsequent salvage logging, a widespread management practice conducted predominantly to recover economic capital, produces further disturbance and impacts biodiversity worldwide. Hence, naturally disturbed forests are among the most threatened habitats in the world, with consequences for their associated biodiversity. However, there are no evidence-based benchmarks for the proportion of area of naturally disturbed forests to be excluded from salvage logging to conserve biodiversity. We apply a mixed rarefaction/extrapolation approach to a global multi-taxa dataset from disturbed forests, including birds, plants, insects and fungi, to close this gap. We find that 757% (mean +/- SD) of a naturally disturbed area of a forest needs to be left unlogged to maintain 90% richness of its unique species, whereas retaining 50% of a naturally disturbed forest unlogged maintains 73 +/- 12% of its unique species richness. These values do not change with the time elapsed since disturbance but vary considerably among taxonomic groups. Salvage logging has become a common practice to gain economic returns from naturally disturbed forests, but it could have considerable negative effects on biodiversity. Here the authors use a recently developed statistical method to estimate that ca. 75% of the naturally disturbed forest should be left unlogged to maintain 90% of the species unique to the area.
Authors/Creators: | Thorn, Simon and Chao, Anne and Georgiev, Kostadin B. and Mueller, Joerg and Baessler, Claus and Campbell, John L. and Castro, Jorge and Chen, Yan-Han and Choi, Chang-Yong and Cobb, Tyler P. and Donato, Daniel C. and Durska, Ewa and Macdonald, Ellen and Feldhaar, Heike and Fontaine, Joseph B. and Fornwalt, Paula J. and Hernandez, Raquel Maria Hernandez and Hutto, Richard L. and Koivula, Matti and Lee, Eun-Jae and Lindenmayer, David and Mikusinski, Grzegorz and Obrist, Martin K. and Perlik, Michal and Rost, Josep and Waldron, Kaysandra and Wermelinger, Beat and Weiss, Ingmar and Zmihorski, Michal and Leverkus, Alexandro B. | ||||||
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Title: | Estimating retention benchmarks for salvage logging to protect biodiversity | ||||||
Series Name/Journal: | Nature Communications | ||||||
Year of publishing : | 2020 | ||||||
Volume: | 11 | ||||||
Article number: | 4762 | ||||||
Number of Pages: | 8 | ||||||
Publisher: | NATURE RESEARCH | ||||||
ISSN: | 2041-1723 | ||||||
Language: | English | ||||||
Publication Type: | Research article | ||||||
Article category: | Scientific peer reviewed | ||||||
Version: | Published version | ||||||
Copyright: | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 | ||||||
Full Text Status: | Public | ||||||
Subjects: | (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 4 Agricultural Sciences > 401 Agricultural, Forestry and Fisheries > Forest Science | ||||||
URN:NBN: | urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-110100 | ||||||
Permanent URL: | http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-110100 | ||||||
Additional ID: |
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ID Code: | 21522 | ||||||
Faculty: | S - Faculty of Forest Sciences | ||||||
Department: | (NL, NJ) > Dept. of Ecology (S) > Dept. of Ecology (S) > School for Forest Management | ||||||
Deposited By: | SLUpub Connector | ||||||
Deposited On: | 22 Jan 2021 13:03 | ||||||
Metadata Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2021 13:11 |
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