More than trees: a European scientific network to assess the relationships between forest structural heterogeneity, multi-taxon biodiversity, and carbon storage
Plus que des arbres: un réseau scientifique européen pour évaluer les relations entre hétérogénéité structurale forestière, biodiversité multi-taxonomique et stockage de carbone
Résumé
Managing forests sustainably is important to preserve biodiversity and the services it underpins, above all climate change mitigation through the storage of carbon in woody biomass. Biodiversity conservation and carbon storage strictly depend on forest structure, and many scientists advocate for a higher degree of structural complexity in order to increase the provision of these ecosystem services. However, a thorough understanding of the trade-offs and synergies between forest biodiversity, structure and function is still lacking especially due to the scattered and inadequate information on the distribution of forest biodiversity, whose sampling and monitoring are particularly complex and costly. By establishing a network of scientists who collected data in European deciduous forests, we were able to create a dataset including information on forest structure and six taxonomic groups (vascular plants, lichens, bryophytes, fungi, beetles and birds) for more than 350 sampling units across France, Hungary and Italy. We used these data to test the following hypotheses: i) a higher degree of forest structural heterogeneity results in higher levels of multi-taxon biodiversity; ii) forest stands containing a high amount of carbon stored in tree aboveground biomass re also those hosting a high degree of multi-taxon biodiversity.