How to reconcile wood production and biodiversity conservation? The Pan-European boreal forest history gradient as an “experiment”

Abstract

There are currently competing demands on Europe's forests and the finite resources and services that they can offer. Forestry intensification that aims at mitigating climate change and biodiversity conservation is one example. Whether or not these two objectives compete can be evaluated by comparative studies of forest landscapes with different histories. We test the hypothesis that indicators of wood production and biodiversity conservation are inversely related in a gradient of long to short forestry intensification histories. Forest management data containing stand age, volume and tree species were used to model the opportunity for wood production and biodiversity conservation in five north European forest regions representing a gradient in landscape history from very long in the West and short in the East. Wood production indicators captured the supply of coniferous wood and total biomass, as well as current accessibility by transport infrastructure. Biodiversity conservation indicators were based on modelling habitat network functionality for focal bird species dependent on different combinations of stand age and tree species composition representing naturally dynamic forests. In each region we randomly sampled 25 individual 100-km areas with contiguous forest cover. Regarding wood production, Sweden's Bergslagen region had the largest areas of coniferous wood, followed by Vitebsk in Belarus and Zemgale in Latvia. NW Russia's case study regions in Pskov and Komi had the lowest values, except for the biomass indicator. The addition of forest accessibility for transportation made the Belarusian and Swedish study region most suitable for wood and biomass production, followed by Latvia and two study regions in NW Russian. Regarding biodiversity conservation, the overall rank among regions was opposite. Mixed and deciduous habitats were functional in Russia, Belarus and Latvia. Old Scots pine and Norway spruce habitats were only functional in Komi. Thus, different regional forest histories provide different challenges in terms of satisfying both wood production and biodiversity conservation objectives in a forest management unit. These regional differences in northern Europe create opportunities for exchanging experiences among different regional contexts about how to achieve both objectives. We discuss this in the context of land-sharing versus land-sparing.

Keeping pace with forestry: Multi-scale conservation in a changing production forest matrix

“…Seek win-win between reduced regeneration costs, natural regeneration, better aesthetics and diversified habitat provision (KSLA 2017;Lodin et al 2017) Monitoring of forest parameters Ensure forest metrics effectively capture the most relevant changes to forest habitat availability planning (Tables 1, 2) would greatly improve the effectiveness of such integrated conservation efforts (Angelstam et al 2011;Michanek et al 2018). The advantage of spatial planning is that it allows the landscape-scale combination of distinct forest land-use categories, including protected and production forest lands, to better achieve both conservation and economic goals (Côté et al 2010;Naumov et al 2018). However, there are obstacles to implementing landscape-level management (Pawson et al 2013), especially in regions, like southern Sweden, that are managed by hundreds of thousands of small-scale private forest owners (McDermott et al 2010;Gustafsson et al 2015).…”

Conservation of disappearing cultural landscape’s biodiversity: are people in Belarus willing to pay for wet grassland restoration?

“…Who should pay for biodiversity conservation, especially for costly active conservation management emulating traditional land use systems such as fen mires or other types of cultural landscapes? Processes in the West have already caused biodiversity loss, and the frontier of intensification is moving to more peripheral areas (e.g., Naumov et al 2018). Is it only those in the East who currently want to intensify land use for human well-being (but began later than their Western counterparts)?…”

Defining Priority Land Covers that Secure the Livelihoods of Urban and Rural People in Ethiopia: a Case Study Based on Citizens’ Preferences

“…Second, to guide tactical spatial planning, there is a need to assess the opportunity for the spatial segregation traditional agroforestry and biodiversity conservation on the one hand, versus integration of them on the other. Spatial modeling of habitat network functionality is an effective approach to assess this [95,96].…”