Aim of study: Harvesting proposals (e.g. variable retention) for Nothofagus pumilio forests are based on canopy opening, to increase recruitment and enhance seedling growth, by modifying light and soil moisture. Seed production and seedling recruitment will define the success of harvesting, where remnant forest structure are the main influence factors, as well as biotic and abiotic factors. The...

The roles of consumers (top-down forces) versus resources (bottom-up forces) as determinants of alpha diversity in a community are not well studied. Numerous community ecology models and empirical studies have provided a framework for understanding how density at various trophic levels responds to variation in the relative strength of top-down and bottom-up forces. The resulting trophic theory ...

Forest degradation is arguably the greatest threat to biodiversity, ecosystem services, and rural livelihoods. Therefore, increasing understanding of how organisms respond to degradation is essential for management and conservation planning. We were motivated by the need for rapid and practical analytical tools to assess the influence of management and degradation on biodiversity and system sta...

Forestry-based carbon sequestration projects demand a comprehensive quantification of the different climate change mitigation effects. In our study, we modeled a life cycle of managed pure stands consisting of the four main tree species in Bavaria (spruce, pine, beech and oak). For spruce and beech, an unmanaged stand was additionally integrated in order to analyze the differences in climate ch...

The montane rainforests of SW Ethiopia are the primary centre of diversity of Coffea arabica and the origin of all Arabica coffee cultivated worldwide. This wild gene pool is potentially threatened by forest fragmentation and degradation, and by introgressive hybridization with locally improved coffee varieties. We genotyped 703 coffee shrubs from unmanaged and managed coffee populations, using...

Landscapes of farms and adjacent areas are known to influence abundance of various arthropods such as pollinators in commercial agricultural ecosystems. In this context, we examined the effect of heterogeneous landscapes surrounding and including commercial apple orchards on pollinator visitation and foraging distance during bloom period from 2011 to 2013 in Pennsylvania. Our results showed tha...

Historical information on forest growth is essential to evaluate and understand change in managed and unmanaged forests. Two ground-truth nondestructive sources of information on interannual to interdecadal changes are (a) repeated timber inventories and (b) tree-ring chronologies. I present here a case study of how those two types of data can complement and benefit each other. At the Gus Pears...

Forest management is often practiced to enhance conditions for wildlife, including native bees. Evaluations of the effects forest on bees have shown that abundance and diversity are higher in newly created early-successional conditions. To date, studies restricted sampling understory; however, recent research finds bee as high or canopies than understories, suggesting previous observations subs...

Despite the major role of Collembola in forest soil animal food webs, ecological and evolutionary determinants of their community composition are not well understood. We investigated abundance, community structure, life forms, and reproductive mode of Collembola in four different forest types (coniferous, young managed beech, old managed beech, and unmanaged beech forests) representing differen...