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Publications (73)
Alien tree plantations are expanding globally with potential negative effects for native biodiversity. We investigated plant species diversity and composition in a Pinus radiata landscape in south-central Chile, a biodiversity hotspot, by sampling understory vegetation in different plantation age classes, along forest roads and in natural forest re...
Tree species diversity can positively affect the multifunctionality of forests. This is why conifer monocultures of Scots pine and Norway spruce, widely promoted in Central Europe since the 18th and 19th century, are currently converted into mixed stands with naturally dominant European beech. Biodiversity is expected to benefit from these mixtures...
Zellweger et al. (Reports, 15 May 2020, p. 772) claimed that a microclimatic debt, mainly controlled by canopy buffering, evolved in European forest understories. However, their analysis is based on circularity, as they explained the sum of three components by one of these components. The response of the understory to the thermal environment is gen...
The non-native Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is widely distributed in Europe and promoted by forestry due to its assumed resistance against climate change. An increasing cultivation area is, however, viewed critically by nature conservation as negative effects on native biodiversity and naturalness are expected. We investigated plant species...
1. For managed temperate forests, conservationists and policymakers favour fine-grained uneven-aged management over more traditional coarse-grained even-aged management, based on the assumption that within-stand habitat heterogeneity enhances biodiversity. There is, however, little empirical evidence to support this assumption. We investigated for...
Accelerated global change, including land use change, is altering plant community composition and challenging conservation in protected areas (PAs) worldwide. Vegetation resurveys of quasi-permanent plots provide insights into these shifts over decades. However, resurvey studies are scarce in the temperate forests of the Andes in northern Patagonia...
Knowledge on mesoclimatic zonation and microclimatic variations within mountain forest ecosystems is crucial for understanding regional species turnover and effects of climate change on these systems. The temperate mountain forests in the Andean region of South America are among the largest and contiguous natural deciduous forest areas in the world...
In 2021, a large transect with 281 10 × 10 m grid cells was re-surveyed in a limestone European beech forest (Hordelymo-Fagetum lathyretosum) on the plateau of the Göttingen Forest after surveys in 1981, 1991, 2001, and 2011. The stand, which has not been managed by forestry since the beginning of the permanent plot study, initially showed an incre...
Plant communities are being exposed to changing environmental conditions all around the globe, leading to alterations in plant diversity, community composition, and ecosystem functioning. For herbaceous understorey communities in temperate forests, responses to global change are postulated to be complex, due to the presence of a tree layer that mod...
Questions
Vegetation resurveys, both single studies and meta‐analyses, have predominantly been based on vascular plant data while bryophytes and lichens have largely been neglected. Our study aims to fill this gap and addresses the following research questions: has the overall species richness of terricolous bryophytes and lichens in forests change...
Natural forests and stands subjected to little to moderate human impact are continuously declining worldwide and with these, their biodiversity and ecosystem services. Many Nothofagus forests in the south of the South American continent are in a pristine state or only moderately impacted by humans. Forest grazing by livestock, in the past and still...
Background
The ability of overstory tree species to regenerate successfully is important for the preservation of tree species diversity and its associated flora and fauna. This study investigated forest regeneration dynamics in the Cat Ba National Park, a biodiversity hotspot in Vietnam. Data was collected from 90 sample plots (500 m ² ) and 450 su...
Changing ecosystem conditions and diverse socio-economical events have contributed to an ingrained presence of non-native tree species (NNTs) in the natural and cultural European landscapes. Recent research endeavors have focused on different aspects of NNTs such as legislation, benefits, and risks for forestry, emphasizing that large knowledge gap...
Plant species diversity and composition play crucial roles in many ecosystem services and are largely influenced by environmental conditions, as well as natural and/or anthropogenic disturbances. However, our knowledge of the drivers of plant species diversity and composition in the limestone forests of Vietnam, a hotspot of biodiversity, is limite...
The two strict forest reserves (SFR) Mörderhäufel and Stutt-pferch were established in the Bienwald/Rhineland-Palati-nate already in the 1960s and 70s. Depending on the strongly fluctuating groundwater level in this area, a mosaic of beech-oak and oak-beech forests on sites far from groundwater , oak-hornbeam forests on sites near groundwater, and...
Durch den Sturm Friederike im Januar 2018 wurden nicht nur viele Fichtenwälder geworfen, sondern es entwickelten sich in den anschließenden heißen und trockenen Jahren auch die Borkenkäferpopulationen explosionsartig und führen nach wie vor bundesweit zu einem großflächigen Absterben von Fichtenbeständen. Es stellen sich u. a. die Fragen, ob ein Si...
Schall et al. (2020) assessed how a combination of different forest management systems in managed forest landscapes dominated by European beech may affect the biodiversity (alpha, beta and gamma) of 14 taxonomic groups. Current forest policy and nature conservation often demand for combining uneven‐aged managed and unmanaged, set‐aside for nature c...
Climate change challenges important native timber species in Central Europe. The introduction of non-native tree species originating from warmer climates is one option to make Central European forests compatible to global warming. This, however, requires an assessment of the species’ growth requirements, and of its impact on biodiversity in its nat...
Background: Forest regeneration is decisive for future forest development and therefore of major concern to forest ecologists. The ability of overstory tree species to regenerate successfully is important for the preservation of tree species diversity and its associated flora and fauna. This study investigated forest regeneration dynamics in the Ca...
The introduction of non-native species with various ecological and functional traits to European forests may be a potential tool for mitigating climate risks. We analyzed the growth sensitivity to climate of seven alien (Acer rubrum, Betula maximowicziana, Castanea sativa, Cryptomeria japonica, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, Thuja plicata and Tsuga...
Der Schutz der Biodiversität ist fester Bestandteil der Waldbauprogramme in Europa. Die wichtigsten Instrumente, die u.a. zum Erhalt der waldassoziierten Flora und Fauna beitragen sollen, sind: die Schaffung strukturreicher, ungleichaltriger Bestände durch kleinflächige Hiebe, die Förderung von Mischbeständen mit standortheimischen Baumarten, die B...
Questions
Light availability at the forest floor affects many forest ecosystem processes, and is often quantified indirectly through easy‐to‐measure stand characteristics. We investigated how three such characteristics, basal area, canopy cover and canopy closure, were related to each other in structurally complex mixed forests. We also asked how w...
Forest management greatly influences biodiversity across spatial scales. At the landscape scale, combining management systems that create different stand properties might promote biodiversity due to complementary species assemblages. In European beech forests, nature conservation and policy advocate a mixture of unmanaged (UNM) forests and uneven‐a...
A central challenge of today's ecological research is predicting how ecosystems will develop under future global change. Accurate predictions are complicated by (a) simultaneous effects of different drivers, such as climate change, nitrogen deposition and management changes; and (b) legacy effects from previous land use.
We tested whether herb laye...
The understorey in temperate forests can play an important functional role, depending on its biomass and functional characteristics. While it is known that local soil and stand characteristics largely determine the biomass of the understorey, less is known about the role of global change. Global change can directly affect understorey biomass, but a...
• Functional traits respond to environmental drivers, hence evaluating trait‐environment relationships across spatial environmental gradients can help to understand how multiple drivers influence plant communities. Global‐change drivers such as changes in atmospheric nitrogen deposition occur worldwide, but affect community trait distributions at t...
Although most of the northern Peruvian Andes are still dominated by diverse cloud and montane forests, agricultural patches and degraded forests are increasingly expanding, while natural habitats are suffering from insidious fragmentation. Subsequent soil degradation often leads to field abandonment, overused forests, or degraded pastures. However,...
Aim: Forest understorey microclimates are often buffered against extreme heat or cold, with important implications for the organisms living in these environments. We quantified seasonal effects of understorey microclimate predictors describing canopy structure, canopy composition and topography (i.e., local factors) and the forest patch size and di...
Topsoil conditions in temperate forests are influenced by several soil-forming factors, such as canopy composition (e.g. through litter quality), land-use history, atmospheric deposition, and the parent material. Many studies have evaluated the effects of single factors on physicochemical topsoil conditions, but few have assessed the simultaneous e...
Floristic data and data from vegetation surveys were compared across 21 strict forest nature reserves (SFNR) in Rhineland-Palatinate (south-west Germany) concerning the proportion of non-native plant species (alien plant species or neophytes) in order to detect general trends in the naturalness and dynamics of unmanaged forests in Central Europe. B...
Fulltext Share Link (until December 15, 2018): https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1XybY57Eq07Kxc *** Abstract: Forests are under pressure from accelerating global change. To cope with the multiple challenges related to global change but also to further improve forest management we need a better understanding of (1) the linkages between drivers of ecosy...
Forecasting the growth of tree species to future environmental changes requires a better understanding of its determinants. Tree growth is known to respond to global‐change drivers such as climate change or atmospheric deposition, as well as to local land‐use drivers such as forest management. Yet, large geographical‐scale studies examining interac...
The composition of forest landscapes in terms of tree age, developmental phases and the share of unmanaged forests is substantial for protecting biodiversity. However, the optimal composition in temperate forests is still under debate. Forest conservationists and policy nevertheless advocate increasing the share of unmanaged and uneven-aged forests...
Monocultures of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) and Norway spruce (Picea abies) have been promoted in Central Europe since the early 19th century due to economical, ecological and management constraints on sites naturally dominated by broadleaved species. Catastrophic damages and the call for multifunctional forest ecosystems with a high degree of na...
Eichenwälder zu erhalten, steht häufig im Konflikt mit dem Konzept einer möglichst störungsarmen, naturnahen oder naturgemäßen Waldwirtschaft, aber auch mit dem Leitbild der potenziell natürlichen Vegetation und der Naturnähe [10]. Besonders gut für die vergleichende Erforschung der Baumartenentwicklung sind Naturwaldreservate, die nicht nur eichen...
The Andes of northern Peru are still widely covered with forests, but increasingly suffer from habitat fragmentation. Subsequent soil degradation often leads to the abandonment of overused forests and pastures. Ecological knowledge on the restoration potential, e.g., on dependencies of soil conditions and altitude, is scarce. Therefore, we compared...
Allium ursinum, a dominant herb layer species in nutrient rich, deciduous forests of Central Europe, has considerably expanded in the past decades. As this species mainly relies on regeneration by seeds, we wanted to analyse if and how the timing of phenological phases, climatic factors and resource availability correlated with flowering intensity...
In the following paper, we use robust optimization to calculate portfolios of Chilean forest stands which minimize the greatest underperformance among all considered ecosystem services (ES) and biodiversity. Forest experts were asked to score the six most important ES indicators and biodiversity for forest stands with either exotic or native tree s...
More and more ecologists have started to resurvey communities sampled in earlier decades to determine long-term shifts in community composition and infer the likely drivers of the ecological changes observed. However, to assess the relative importance of and interactions among multiple drivers, joint analyses of resurvey data from many regions span...
Steep slopes of low mountain ranges have a high small-scale heterogeneity and were early used by humans as fortification in times of danger. This caused a high floristic diversity with high conservation value. Environmental and management changes have, however, influenced these sites in the past decades. By analyzing old floristic lists and vegetat...
European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) is the prevailing tree species of mesic forests in Central Europe. Increasing summer temperatures and decreasing precipitation, as climate change scenarios predict, may, however, negatively influence beech growth and induce a shift to more thermophilous forest communities. Temperatures as expected in the future f...
Questions
How do vegetation changes in a limestone beech forest community on dry and nutrient‐poor slopes differ from changes in a community on moist and nutrient‐rich soils over the past 50 yr? Have temporal changes led to a further differentiation between communities?
Location
Ancient, beech‐dominated forest region on limestone in central German...
River regulation and lowering of the water table have dramatically changed the ecological conditions of the floodplain forests in Central Europe. In the unmanaged 'Kerpener Bruch' strict forest nature reserve, a formerly flooded hardwood forest of the lower Rhine valley, alder (Alnus glutinosa), oak (Quercus robur) and elm (Ulmus spec.) decreased w...
Plantations with fast growing exotic tree species can negatively affect native plant species diversity and promote the spread of alien species. Mediterranean Chile experienced major landscape changes with a vast expansion of industrial plantations of Pinus radiata in the past. However, with increasing knowledge of biodiversity effects on ecosystem...
Floristic data and data from vegetation surveys were compared across 19 strict forest nature reserves (SFNR) in Rhineland- Palatinate (south-west Germany) concerning vegetation structure and species richness in order to detect general trends in forest dynamics in Central Europe. A comparison of fenced and unfenced plots allowed an assessment of bro...
High human density and land use intensity often coincide with biodiversity hotspots making peri-urban reserves a keystone for conserving natural remnants in a highly anthropogenic matrix. Particularly, intense propagule pressure by alien plant species can pose a threat to native biodiversity. However, little is known about the factors that determin...
Schmidt, W., heinrichS, S.: Environmental and land use change in beech forests on limestone (Hordelymo-Fagetum lathyretosum)-A comparison of old and recent vegetation surveys from the Göttinger Wald.-Hercynia N. F. 48 (2015): 21-50.
Species rich mesophilous beech forests on limestone (Hordelymo-Fagetum lathyretosum) are rare in Central Europe. Alt...
A spread of Hedera helix L. into beech forests has been observed during the last 20 years in Central Europe. As this species is susceptible to intensive frost, it is believed that climate change with mild winters is the responsible driver. Other factors can, however, be equally important including forest management, eutrophication, and browsing. We...
Four gaps of 30 m diameter were cut in a mature European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) forest in 1989. In two of the gaps and their surrounding areas, dolomite lime (3 t ha−1) was applied. The study was designed to examine the long-term effects of lime application and canopy removal on element input via throughfall and output in seepage water at 80 cm...
Aim: The vegetation of Central European beech forests has changed considerably over the past decades. However, the influence of land-use, climate change, eutrophication and deer browsing on thermophilous beech forests on dry slopes is unknown. We compared vegetation relevés from 1955 to 1960 with recent surveys and asked: (1) How did structure, div...
The objective of repeated surveys on permanent plots in strict forest nature reserves is to document forest development without management in order to determine recommendations for silvicultural practice and nature conservation. Such surveys, regarding vegetation and tree regeneration, exist for the strict forest nature reserve “Am Sandweg” (lower...
Based on vegetation surveys conducted in four now unmanaged beech forests in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia we investigated the development of natural tree regeneration after disturbance. The strict forest nature reserves Limker Strang (Soiling), Totenberg (Bramwald), Königsbuche (Harzvorland) and Ochsenberg (Eggegebirge) represent submont...
The aim of this study was to investigate the vegetation dynamics of suboceanic, submontane, mesic beech forests on lime-stone that are very rich in spring geophytes over half a century, considering changes in abiotic and biotic conditions including global climate change. Vegetation relevés sampled in the Göttinger Wald, southern Lower Saxony, Germa...
On December 1st 1988 an ice break caused severe disturbances in beech forests of eastern Westphalia. Within the strict forest reserve Ochsenberg (Eggegebirge/North Rhine-Westphalia) two permanent plots (fenced and unfenced core areas) were established on an eastern slope covered with beech forest on limestone, to document the natural forest regener...
The strict forest reserve "Königsbuche" was established in 1972. In 1997, parts of the old beech stand were destroyed by a local summer storm, which created a disturbance gradient ranging from unaffected areas to smaller and extensively large gaps. After a first inventory during the years 1998 to 2001, flora and vegetation were recorded again on pe...
Long-term vegetation monitoring on permanent plots in strict forest reserves provides a helpful tool to indentify the influence of climate change on forest vegetation. Thus, this study investigated the impact of climate change on the vegetation development in 30 strict beech forest reserves in North Rhine-Westphalia, comparing data from the late 80...
The estimation model PhytoCalc allows a non-destructive quantification of dry weight and nutrient pools of understorey plants in forests by using the relationship between species biomass, cover and mean shoot length. The model has been validated with independent samples in several German forest types and can be a useful tool in forest monitoring. H...
Non-destructive assessments of understorey biomass (ground vegetation, shrubs and tree regeneration) have recently attracted increasing interest for forest monitoring activities. Area-related assessments using the PhytoCalc method enable estimates of ground vegetation’s biomass and elemental stocks above ground. However, thus far tree regeneration...
The conversion of even-aged Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.) stands into more site adapted mixed stands is the main silvicultural goal in Germany and many other European countries. The conversion will primarily be achieved with the help of selection cutting, removing single target diameter trees and creating small gaps. At sites highly su...
Non-native plant species in beech and Norway spruce forests of the Solling Hills The proportion of alien plant species in the ground vegetation of beech forests and Norway spruce stands on acidic soils was investigated by comparing vegetation relevés in the Solling Hills (Lower Saxony) obtained from different research projects during four decades....
