A recently published article from our Portuguese partner ISA draws a glance at landscape level of the ecosystem services biodiversity conservation at the pilot region Vale do Sousa. Botequim et al. integrate an effective stand-level biodiversity indicator that reflects tree species composition, stand age, and understory coverage under divergent climate conditions and linear programming optimization techniques to guide forest actors in seeing optimal forest practices to safeguard future biodiversity. The results highlight the potential of the approach to help assess the impact of both stand and landscape-level forest management models on biodiversity conservation goals. They demonstrate further that the approach provides insights about how climate change, timber demand and wildfire resistance may impact plans that target the optimization of biodiversity values. The set of optimized long-term solutions emphasizes a multifunctional forest that guarantees a desirable local level of biodiversity and resilience to wildfires, while providing a balanced production of wood over time at the landscape scale.
For the full abstract and article follow https://doi.org/10.3390/land10020126
- Botequim B, Bugalho MN, Rodrigues AR, Marques S, Marto M, Borges JG (2021): Combining Tree Species Composition and Understory Coverage Indicators with Optimization Techniques to Address Concerns with Landscape-Level Biodiversity. Land. 2021; 10(2):126. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10020126 [Article]