TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kortmann, Mareike
A1  - Roth, Nicolas
A1  - Buse, Jörn
A1  - Hilszczański, Jacek
A1  - Jaworski, Tomasz
A1  - Morinière, Jérôme
A1  - Seidl, Rupert
A1  - Thorn, Simon
A1  - Müller, Jörg C.
T1  - Arthropod dark taxa provide new insights into diversity responses to bark beetle infestations
JF  - Ecological Applications
N2  - Natural disturbances are increasing around the globe, also impacting protected areas. Although previous studies have indicated that natural disturbances result in mainly positive effects on biodiversity, these analyses mostly focused on a few well established taxonomic groups, and thus uncertainty remains regarding the comprehensive impact of natural disturbances on biodiversity. Using Malaise traps and meta‐barcoding, we studied a broad range of arthropod taxa, including dark and cryptic taxa, along a gradient of bark beetle disturbance severities in five European national parks. We identified order‐level community thresholds of disturbance severity and classified barcode index numbers (BINs; a cluster system for DNA sequences, where each cluster corresponds to a species) as negative or positive disturbance indicators. Negative indicator BINs decreased above thresholds of low to medium disturbance severity (20%–30% of trees killed), whereas positive indicator BINs benefited from high disturbance severity (76%–98%). BINs allocated to a species name contained nearly as many positive as negative disturbance indicators, but dark and cryptic taxa, particularly Diptera and Hymenoptera in our data, contained higher numbers of negative disturbance indicator BINs. Analyses of changes in the richness of BINs showed variable responses of arthropods to disturbance severity at lower taxonomic levels, whereas no significant signal was detected at the order level due to the compensatory responses of the underlying taxa. We conclude that the analyses of dark taxa can offer new insights into biodiversity responses to disturbances. Our results suggest considerable potential for forest management to foster arthropod diversity, for example by maintaining both closed‐canopy forests (>70% cover) and open forests (<30% cover) on the landscape.
KW  - arthropods
KW  - biodiversity
KW  - conservation
KW  - metabarcoding
KW  - national park
KW  - natural disturbance
KW  - threshold indicator taxa analysis
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-276392
VL  - 32
IS  - 2
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Thorn, Simon
A1  - Chao, Anne
A1  - Georgiev, Konstadin B.
A1  - Müller, Jörg
A1  - Bässler, Claus
A1  - Campbell, John L.
A1  - Jorge, Castro
A1  - Chen, Yan-Han
A1  - Choi, Chang-Yong
A1  - Cobb, Tyler P.
A1  - Donato, Daniel C.
A1  - Durska, Ewa
A1  - Macdonald, Ellen
A1  - Feldhaar, Heike
A1  - Fontaine, Jospeh B.
A1  - Fornwalt, Paula J.
A1  - Hernández Hernández, Raquel María
A1  - Hutto, Richard L.
A1  - Koivula, Matti
A1  - Lee, Eun-Jae
A1  - Lindenmayer, David
A1  - Mikusinski, Grzegorz
A1  - Obrist, Martin K.
A1  - Perlík, Michal
A1  - Rost, Josep
A1  - Waldron, Kaysandra
A1  - Wermelinger, Beat
A1  - Weiß, Ingmar
A1  - Zmihorski, Michal
A1  - Leverkus, Alexandro B.
T1  - Estimating retention benchmarks for salvage logging to protect biodiversity
JF  - Nature Communications
N2  - 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 757% (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. Salvage logging has become a common practice to gain economic returns from naturally disturbed forests, but it could have considerable negative effects on biodiversity. Here the authors use a recently developed statistical method to estimate that ca. 75% of the naturally disturbed forest should be left unlogged to maintain 90% of the species unique to the area.
KW  - natural disturbance
KW  - bird communities
KW  - forest
KW  - management
KW  - beetle
KW  - conservation
KW  - windthrow
KW  - diversity
KW  - impact
KW  - fire
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-230512
VL  - 11
ER  -