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The White-backed Woodpecker Dendrocopos leucotos is an indicator for large old forests with a high amount of deadwood, typically not present in managed forests. Photo by J. Peltomäki.
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... Deadwood is the most common one since it serves as a habitat, substrate, or hiding, breeding, or feeding place for numerous saproxylic, epixylic, and other organisms (Stockland et al., 2012). Large trees are also often considered based on their importance for epiphytic species and cavity-nesting birds and bats (Mollet et al., 2013;Hofmeister et al., 2015). Intensive studies of deadwood and large trees can be explained also by the fact that both are strongly reduced in managed forests, thus organisms related to them are especially threatened (Stockland et al., 2012;Bütler et al., 2013). ...
... Besides, temperature and humidity are also determined by the stand structure and may be crucial for several taxa (Renvall, 1995;Oxbrough et al., 2006;Nordén et al., 2012). Understory vegetation offers heterogeneous habitats for animals living near the ground (Riechert and Gillespie, 1986;Mollet et al., 2013), while due to trophic relationships understory species richness and cover may influence the diversity and composition of herbivores and taxa on higher trophic levels (Tews et al., 2004). Soil and litter conditions may determine the plant assemblages (Hofmeister et al., 2019) and the soil-inhabiting fungi (Ferris et al., 2000), while mainly litter characteristics can influence the ground-dwelling arthropods such as carabids (Sklodowski, 2014) and spiders (Ziesche and Roth, 2008). ...
... Soil and litter conditions may determine the plant assemblages (Hofmeister et al., 2019) and the soil-inhabiting fungi (Ferris et al., 2000), while mainly litter characteristics can influence the ground-dwelling arthropods such as carabids (Sklodowski, 2014) and spiders (Ziesche and Roth, 2008). The surrounding landscape can be relevant for taxa acting on larger areas, such as birds or larger mammals (Mollet et al., 2013), or for taxa with good dispersal ability . Land-use history may be crucial for species with low dispersal because they can hardly recolonize if the forest continuity is breaking (Hermy and Verheyen, 2007). ...
Harmonization of timber production and forest conservation is a major challenge of modern silviculture. For the establishment of ecologically sustainable forest management, the management-related environmental drivers of multi-taxon biodiversity should be explored. Our study reveals those environmental variables related to tree species diversity and composition, stand structure, litter and soil conditions, microclimate, landscape, and land-use history that determine species richness and composition of 11 forest-dwelling organism groups. Herbs, woody regeneration, ground-floor and epiphytic bryophytes, epiphytic lichens, terricolous saprotrophic, ectomycorrhizal, and wood-inhabiting macrofungi, spiders, carabid beetles, and birds were sampled in West Hungarian mature mixed forests. The correlations among the diversities and compositions of different organism groups were also evaluated.
Drivers of organism groups were principally related to stand structure, tree species diversity and composition, and microclimate, while litter, soil, landscape, and land-use historical variables were less influential. The complex roles of the shrub layer, deadwood, and the size of the trees in determining the diversity and composition of various taxa were revealed. Stands with more tree species sustained higher stand-level species richness of several taxa. Besides, stands with different dominant tree species harbored various species communities of organism groups. Therefore, landscape-scale diversity of dominant tree species may enhance the diversity of forest-dwelling communities at landscape level. The effects of the overstory layer on forest biodiversity manifested in many cases via microclimate conditions. Diversity of organism groups showed weaker relationship with the diversity of other taxa than with environmental variables.
According to our results, the most influential drivers of forest biodiversity are under the direct control of the actual silvicultural management. Heterogeneous stand structure and tree species composition promote the different organism groups in various ways. Therefore, the long-term maintenance of the structural and compositional heterogeneity both at stand and landscape scale is an important aspect of ecologically sustainable forest management.
... We recommend conserving more habitat trees, particularly cavity trees, in harvested areas. These retained trees should mainly be old standards since (1) tree dbh is positively and significantly correlated with TreM occurrence for most TreMs (e.g., Vuidot et al. 2011;Larrieu et al. 2014), (2) the largest trees bear the highest diversity of TreM types (Larrieu et al. 2014), and (3) several taxa including birds, insects, bryophytes and lichens need old, large trees to support rich assemblages (Kriebizsch et al. 2013;Mollet et al. 2013;Wermelinger et al. 2013). In addition, recruiting a higher density of young standards when harvesting would be a complementary way to increase the density of habitat trees since standards contain a markedly higher proportion of habitat trees than do coppice trees. ...
European forest managers are implementing set-aside measures in managed forests to restore key structures for forest biodiversity such as tree-related microhabitats (TreMs). However, the time required to regenerate these structures is little known. We assessed the patterns of thirteen TreM types on 282 plots in 24 lowland forests in southwestern France. We applied a synchronic sequence ranging from 1 to 80 years after the last harvest, a time frame which is considered long enough to observe significant changes in the TreM profile. We sampled lowland beech–oak coppice-with-standards stands representative of the different forest ownerships and management regimes occurring in France; our assessment included both public and private forests with or without formal management plans. We found that both TreM density and diversity just after harvesting were lower, though not significantly so, in private stands without any management plan than in the other management regimes. We observed both significantly higher TreM density and diversity in plots harvested 10–15 years ago than in plots harvested 1–5 years ago. The next marked difference did not occur until stands had been harvested 70–80 years ago. Globally, time since last harvest was the best explanatory variable for variations in both TreM density and diversity. We therefore recommend: (1) conserving more habitat trees in harvested areas, particularly cavity trees, since the densities we observed were much lower than the densities required by cavity-dwelling species, and (2) letting set-aside patches freely complete several full silvigenetic cycles. This latter practice would avoid the inefficacy (or possibly even negative effects) of a temporary conservation network, and would also simplify management of the network over time. Further research should assess TreM occurrences in a permanent reserve network. Diachronic observations would make it possible to highlight the drivers of TreM profile development.
