Land use and land use change affect deadwood amount, quality and associated biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Old growth or virgin forests, which are exceptionally rare in temperate Europe harbor more deadwood and associated fungal species than managed forests. Whether and how more recent abandonment of management, to reestablish more natural forests, affects deadwood amount and fungal diversi...

Forest regenerationmethods such as shelterwood treatments have been shown to substantially increase the diversity of bird species, specifically of species that prefer early seral forests, now rare in the eastern United States. Stand improvement techniques such as thinnings have also been found to increase avian diversity under some conditions. A sustainably managed forest, however, must simulta...

An extreme ice storm in January 1998 deposited up to 100 mm of ice and resulted in significant forest damage across eastern North America. Average crown loss of over 75% was recorded in large areas of eastern Ontario and southern Quebec. A primary question that arose following the storm was: can forest damage be effectively assessed using remote sensing and other available environmental data? T...

Climate change and forest disturbances are threatening the ability of forested mountain watersheds to provide the clean, reliable, and abundant fresh water necessary to support aquatic ecosystems and a growing human population. Here, we used 76 years of water yield, climate, and field plot vegetation measurements in six unmanaged, reference watersheds in the southern Appalachian Mountains of No...

Timber management directly influences the population dynamics of tree species, like Copaifera spp. (copaíba), which provide oil-resin with ecological and economic importance. The aim of this study was to evaluate the structure and population dynamics of Copaifera in unmanaged and managed stands by reduced-impact logging (RIL) in eastern Amazon in Pará state, Brazil. Based on a stem map of the s...

Lichens are a key component of forest biodiversity. However, a comprehensive study analyzing lichen species richness in relation to several management types, extending over different regions and forest stages and including information on site conditions is missing for temperate European forests. In three German regions (Schwäbische Alb, Hainich-Dün, Schorfheide-Chorin), the so-called Biodiversi...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usefulness and sensitivity of patameters that describe various soil organic matter characteristics for the evaluation of harvesting impacts on ecosystem function, using an ecosystem-level. hybrid simulation model (FORECAST, a model developed from its predecessor FORCYTE-1 1). Four separate sets of forest management options were applied to both a sim...

South Chilean forest ecosystems represent one of the largest areas of old-growth temperate rainforests remaining in the Southern hemisphere and have a high ecological value, but suffer from deforestation, invasion by exotic species, fragmentation, and increasing atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition. To support sustainable forest management, more knowledge is required on nutrient cycling of these...