Estimating retention benchmarks for salvage logging to protect biodiversity

Simon Thorn*, Anne Chao, Kostadin B. Georgiev, Jörg Müller, Claus Bässler, John L. Campbell, Jorge Castro, Yan Han Chen, Chang Yong Choi, Tyler P. Cobb, Daniel C. Donato, Ewa Durska, Ellen Macdonald, Heike Feldhaar, Joseph B. Fontaine, Paula J. Fornwalt, Raquel María Hernández Hernández, Richard L. Hutto, Matti Koivula, Eun Jae LeeDavid Lindenmayer, Grzegorz Mikusiński, Martin K. Obrist, Michal Perlík, Josep Rost, Kaysandra Waldron, Beat Wermelinger, Ingmar Weiß, Michał Żmihorski, Alexandro B. Leverkus

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    74 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Forests are increasingly affected by natural disturbances. Subsequent salvage logging, a widespread management practice conducted predominantly to recover economic capital, produces further disturbance and impacts biodiversity worldwide. Hence, naturally disturbed forests are among the most threatened habitats in the world, with consequences for their associated biodiversity. However, there are no evidence-based benchmarks for the proportion of area of naturally disturbed forests to be excluded from salvage logging to conserve biodiversity. We apply a mixed rarefaction/extrapolation approach to a global multi-taxa dataset from disturbed forests, including birds, plants, insects and fungi, to close this gap. We find that 75 ± 7% (mean ± SD) of a naturally disturbed area of a forest needs to be left unlogged to maintain 90% richness of its unique species, whereas retaining 50% of a naturally disturbed forest unlogged maintains 73 ± 12% of its unique species richness. These values do not change with the time elapsed since disturbance but vary considerably among taxonomic groups.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number4762
    JournalNature Communications
    Volume11
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020

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