Identification of zones with high potential for biological diversity on dormant forested landslides

Abstract

Landslides and erosion processes cause a high level of morphological diversity which, over the course of time, results in an increased level of forest species and habitat biodiversity. According to the principles of landscape ecology, information concerning points of convergence-understood as transition zones between elementary parts of a slope-could be interpreted as a surrogate for biodiversity. To recognize locations of land surface disruption, points of convergence derived from a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) were used in the research. It was assumed that relationships exist between landslide geodiversity and biodiversity and that from the DEM it is possible to select bare-earth surface structures where points of convergence can be identified. In order to verify this hypothesis, indicators of biodiversity such as richness of plant species and species diversity were checked. Based on the spatial distribution of points of convergence, locations of sample plots were planned and these indicators were verified during fieldwork. Samples were taken both in areas with a high concentration of points of convergence and in areas with a low concentration (or absence) of points of convergence. The results show that species diversity in the areas having a high concentration of points of convergence was significantly higher than in the areas having a low concentration of points of convergence. The proposed method allows the selection of parts of forested landslides that have the potential to develop a high level of biological diversity; it thus supports the management of areas of forest ecosystems with high levels of biodiversity within the scope of a cutting system. This may entail avoiding the traversal of areas that potentially possess high biological diversity with skid roads, preserving parts of these areas with thick vegetation for forest game purposes or leaving predominant and dead trees. The proposed method may also be used in scientific research into processes of biodiversity appearing on forested landslides.

Old Processes, New Movements: The Inclusion of Geodiversity in Biological and Ecological Discourse

“…These works specifically suggested that geodiversity was, or could be a possible, defining criteria in the distribution and/or abundance of marshland taxa [23], invertebrates [24,25], plants [26][27][28][29][30][31], and marine taxa [32], primarily in a qualitative sense. Newer research was more quantitative in nature, and considered geodiversity parameters such as soil textural variation and landform rugosity as a component of species and habitat distribution modelling [33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

¿Es posible conservar la diversidad biológica y producir madera en las plantaciones de pino de la Patagonia argentina? Un estudio de caso

“…A pesar de que en el ecotono hay una mayor cantidad de especies que podrían tener la capacidad de sobrevivir en ambientes con menos intensidad de luz (Dezzotti et al 2021), el efecto de la alta cobertura de P. ponderosa inhibió su crecimiento y desarrollo de la misma manera que a las plantas de la estepa. La mayor riqueza de familias y especies en el ecotono, en comparación con la de la estepa, se debería a la convergencia de la distribución de plantas con adaptaciones diferentes a la aridez en esta área de transición ambiental (Farina 2006;Walz 2011;Tracz et al 2019). Sin embargo, la menor dominancia de especies en la estepa, asociada a la menor equitatividad, determinó una diversidad equivalente en ambos tipos de vegetación.…”

Stand Structural Characteristics Are the Most Practical Biodiversity Indicators for Forest Management Planning in Europe

“…Collecting forest biodiversity data by remote sensing technology was applied in numerous studies and is considered broad-scale, accurate, and more cost-effective and faster than field sampling [40,41,45,59,68,113,[117][118][119]. Ozdemir et al [45] used satellite images to predict bird species richness and micro-habitat diversity in brutian pine (Pinus brutia) forest ecosystems in Turkey.…”