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New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages

Windstorms, bark beetle outbreaks and fires are important natural disturbances in coniferous forests worldwide. Wind-thrown trees promote biodiversity and restoration within production forests, but also cause large economic losses due to bark beetle infestation and accelerated fungal decomposition....

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Autores principales: Thorn, Simon, Bässler, Claus, Gottschalk, Thomas, Hothorn, Torsten, Bussler, Heinz, Raffa, Kenneth, Müller, Jörg
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106782/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25050914
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101757
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author Thorn, Simon
Bässler, Claus
Gottschalk, Thomas
Hothorn, Torsten
Bussler, Heinz
Raffa, Kenneth
Müller, Jörg
author_facet Thorn, Simon
Bässler, Claus
Gottschalk, Thomas
Hothorn, Torsten
Bussler, Heinz
Raffa, Kenneth
Müller, Jörg
author_sort Thorn, Simon
collection PubMed
description Windstorms, bark beetle outbreaks and fires are important natural disturbances in coniferous forests worldwide. Wind-thrown trees promote biodiversity and restoration within production forests, but also cause large economic losses due to bark beetle infestation and accelerated fungal decomposition. Such damaged trees are often removed by salvage logging, which leads to decreased biodiversity and thus increasingly evokes discussions between economists and ecologists about appropriate strategies. To reveal the reasons behind species loss after salvage logging, we used a functional approach based on four habitat-related ecological traits and focused on saproxylic beetles. We predicted that salvage logging would decrease functional diversity (measured as effect sizes of mean pairwise distances using null models) as well as mean values of beetle body size, wood diameter niche and canopy cover niche, but would increase decay stage niche. As expected, salvage logging caused a decrease in species richness, but led to an increase in functional diversity by altering the species composition from habitat-filtered assemblages toward random assemblages. Even though salvage logging removes tree trunks, the most negative effects were found for small and heliophilous species and for species specialized on wood of small diameter. Our results suggested that salvage logging disrupts the natural assembly process on windthrown trees and that negative ecological impacts are caused more by microclimate alteration of the dead-wood objects than by loss of resource amount. These insights underline the power of functional approaches to detect ecosystem responses to anthropogenic disturbance and form a basis for management decisions in conservation. To mitigate negative effects on saproxylic beetle diversity after windthrows, we recommend preserving single windthrown trees or at least their tops with exposed branches during salvage logging. Such an extension of the green-tree retention approach to windthrown trees will preserve natural succession and associated communities of disturbed spruce forests.
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spelling pubmed-41067822014-07-23 New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages Thorn, Simon Bässler, Claus Gottschalk, Thomas Hothorn, Torsten Bussler, Heinz Raffa, Kenneth Müller, Jörg PLoS One Research Article Windstorms, bark beetle outbreaks and fires are important natural disturbances in coniferous forests worldwide. Wind-thrown trees promote biodiversity and restoration within production forests, but also cause large economic losses due to bark beetle infestation and accelerated fungal decomposition. Such damaged trees are often removed by salvage logging, which leads to decreased biodiversity and thus increasingly evokes discussions between economists and ecologists about appropriate strategies. To reveal the reasons behind species loss after salvage logging, we used a functional approach based on four habitat-related ecological traits and focused on saproxylic beetles. We predicted that salvage logging would decrease functional diversity (measured as effect sizes of mean pairwise distances using null models) as well as mean values of beetle body size, wood diameter niche and canopy cover niche, but would increase decay stage niche. As expected, salvage logging caused a decrease in species richness, but led to an increase in functional diversity by altering the species composition from habitat-filtered assemblages toward random assemblages. Even though salvage logging removes tree trunks, the most negative effects were found for small and heliophilous species and for species specialized on wood of small diameter. Our results suggested that salvage logging disrupts the natural assembly process on windthrown trees and that negative ecological impacts are caused more by microclimate alteration of the dead-wood objects than by loss of resource amount. These insights underline the power of functional approaches to detect ecosystem responses to anthropogenic disturbance and form a basis for management decisions in conservation. To mitigate negative effects on saproxylic beetle diversity after windthrows, we recommend preserving single windthrown trees or at least their tops with exposed branches during salvage logging. Such an extension of the green-tree retention approach to windthrown trees will preserve natural succession and associated communities of disturbed spruce forests. Public Library of Science 2014-07-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4106782/ /pubmed/25050914 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101757 Text en © 2014 Thorn et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Thorn, Simon
Bässler, Claus
Gottschalk, Thomas
Hothorn, Torsten
Bussler, Heinz
Raffa, Kenneth
Müller, Jörg
New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages
title New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages
title_full New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages
title_fullStr New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages
title_full_unstemmed New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages
title_short New Insights into the Consequences of Post-Windthrow Salvage Logging Revealed by Functional Structure of Saproxylic Beetles Assemblages
title_sort new insights into the consequences of post-windthrow salvage logging revealed by functional structure of saproxylic beetles assemblages
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106782/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25050914
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101757
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