8.02.02 – Forest biodiversity and resilience
Hervé Jactel, France
About Unit
The main objective of the new Working Party will be to encourage and support the co-operation among forest scientists in order to investigate the impact of diversity loss on forest ecosystem functioning. Special attention will be given to the potential of biodiversity restoration for increasing forest sustainability.
State of Knowledge
The world is faced with an unprecedented loss of biodiversity, mainly due to human activities. Boreal, temperate and tropical forests offer a wide array of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms, collectively representing the majority of terrestrial biodiversity. Forest biodiversity is rapidly being lost due to deforestation, fragmentation and degradation of forests. While the dramatic extinction rate of forest species is undoubtedly an important conservation concern, there is a potentially equally dramatic degradation of forest ecosystem properties and functioning. The scientific community has come to a consensus on two main aspects of the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: changes in plant species richness and composition may have a strong effect on ecosystem productivity as well as their susceptibility to the invasion by exotic species. However patterns of responses to changes in species richness are strongly influenced by the functional traits of the species involved. Furthermore, these responses are less clear when several trophic levels are being considered, i.e. when analyses focus not only on producers but also on responses of herbivores to plant diversity loss. Finally most of the scientific evidence for such relationships has been provided by observations and experiments on grasslands communities whereas few relevant studies have addressed the question in perennial ecosystems such as forests. Greater efforts at testing the biodiversity – ecosystem functioning hypothesis in forest constitute a clear need for future investigation.
