scholarly journals An ecosystem services approach to the ecological effects of salvage logging: valuation of seed dispersal

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 1057-1063 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandro B. Leverkus ◽  
Jorge Castro
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 391-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandro B Leverkus ◽  
Lena Gustafsson ◽  
David B Lindenmayer ◽  
Jorge Castro ◽  
José María Rey Benayas ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (8) ◽  
pp. 987-999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalesh Dhar ◽  
Lael Parrott ◽  
Scott Heckbert

After affecting millions of hectares of pine forests in western Canada, the mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonous ponderosae Hopkins) is spreading out of its native range and into Canada’s boreal forest. Impacts of outbreaks can be environmental, economic, and social, and an ecosystem services (ES) viewpoint provides a useful perspective for an integrated approach to assessing these impacts and may help to identify how possible management strategies could minimize these impacts. In this regards, a comprehensive overview of the ecosystem functions and socioeconomic factors that have been impacted by the current outbreaks in western Canada was carried out to facilitate a more general ES assessment. In addition to timber production, current MPB outbreaks have negative effects on provisioning services (water supply and food production) and aesthetic cultural services, while effects on regulating services (carbon and forest fire) are still in debate. Among the supporting services, nutrient cycling and aquatic habitat showed short- and long-term negative effects, while terrestrial habitat showed a mostly positive response. The overall impact on ES may be more severe if salvage logging is practiced as a post-MPB forest management strategy. The outcomes of this study may help to identify areas of greatest socioecological vulnerability to MPB and identify knowledge gaps and avenues for research to advance the ES framework for MPB outbreak management.


Author(s):  
Qipeng Liao ◽  
Zhe Wang ◽  
Chunbo Huang

Land use planning usually increases the uncertainties of the ecosystem structures and functions because various human demands usually bring both positive and negative ecological effects. It is critical for estimating various land use changes and their ecological effects, but the previous studies have failed to decouple the respective and the combined effects of different land use changes on ecosystem services. Net primary productivity (NPP) could be used to indicate many ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and storage. Here, we employed a light use efficiency model to estimate the spatial and temporal dynamics of NPP in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) area from 2000 to 2015, and designed four scenarios to analyze the relative roles of afforestation, urbanization and storing water on NPP dynamics. Our results documented that terrestrial NPP of the TGR area increased from 547.40 gC•m−2 to 629.96 gC•m−2, and carbon sequestration capacities were 31.66 TgC (1Tg = 1012g) and 36.79 TgC in 2000 and 2015, respectively. Climate change and land use change both could contribute to carbon sequestration with 4.08 TgC and 1.05 TgC. Among these land use changes, only afforestation could sequester carbon with 2.04 TgC, while urbanization-induced and impoundment-induced emissions were 0.12 TgC and 0.32 TgC, respectively, and other land use changes also could release 0.55 TgC of carbon. This finding suggested that although positive and negative environmental effects happened simultaneously over the past decades, green infrastructure could effectively offset the carbon emissions from urbanization and storing water in the TGR area, which provides some fundamental supports for further ecological restoration and contributes to empowering land use policies towards carbon sequestration and storage at the regional scale.


Author(s):  
B. F. Lessi ◽  
M. G. Reis ◽  
C. Z. Fieker ◽  
M. M. Dias

Abstract Birds play a key role in ecosystem dynamics, including urban and rural areas, bringing environmental quality improvements and ecological stability. Species contribute directly to natural regeneration of vegetation and succession processes, by offering ecosystem services as seed dispersal, an important role in human-modified areas. We studied the assemblages of fruit-eating birds in riparian environments of Monjolinho basin, central São Paulo state, southeastern Brazil. Birds were recorded in 41 points distributed in riparian ecosystems alongside waterbodies, in landscapes with five types of surrounding matrices: urban, periurban, farmland, and native vegetation. We described how assemblages are structured aiming to evaluate the possible influence of seasonality and landscape type. We recorded 39 bird species that can play a role as seed-dispersers, 32 in wet season and 32 in dry season. There were no significant differences in the diversity and dominance of species between seasons considering the entire area, indicating stability of basic assemblage structure. However, total number of individuals of all species recorded in different landscapes were influenced by seasonality. Also, the composition and abundance of species significantly changed between seasons, leading to a high dissimilarity with almost 50% of the species contributing with almost 90% of the observed variation. A higher taxonomic diversity and distinctness pointed to a wider array of possible seed dispersal services in natural areas, while the lowest values of indexes were found in human-modified areas. The higher number of non-related bird species during dry season contrasted with the higher number of individuals during wet season, indicating that there is more possible ecosystem services offered by frugivorous birds in driest period of the year, while in the rainy period the carrying capacity of the riparian environments was increased.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e25345
Author(s):  
Tereza Giannini ◽  
Marcelo Awade ◽  
Leonardo Miranda ◽  
Leonardo Trevelin ◽  
Carlos Silva ◽  
...  

Understanding the role that species play in their environment is a fundamental goal of biodiversity research, bringing knowledge on ecosystem maintenance and in provision of ecosystem services. Different types of interaction that different species establish with their partners regulate the functioning of ecosystems (McCann 2007). Interactions between plants and pollinators (Potts et al. 2016) and between plants and seed dispersers (Wang and Smith 2002) are examples of mutualism, crucial to the maintenance of the floristic composition and overall biodiversity in different biomes. They also illustrate well the nature's contribution to people, supporting ecosystem services with key economic consequences, such as pollination of agricultural crops (Klein et al. 2007) and seed dispersal of natural or assisted restoration of degraded areas (Wunderle 1997). Interactions are mediated by different functional traits (morphological and/or behavioral characteristics of organisms that influence their performance) (Ball et al. 2015). As the zoochorous transfer of pollen grains and seeds usually involves contact, the success of pollination and seed dispersal depends to a large extend on the relationship of size and morphology between flower/fruit and their respective pollinator/seed disperser. Selected over a long history of shared evolutionary history, it is feasible to rely on the predictive potential these traits may have to determine if a certain animal is able to transfer pollen grains and/or seeds of specific plants in the landscape (Howe 2016). Biodiversity is facing constant negative impacts, especially related to climate and habitat changes. They are threatening the provision of ecosystem services, jeopardizing the basic premise of sustainable development, which is to guarantee resources for future generations. The novel landscapes that result from these impacts will certainly be dependent of these ecosystem services, but will they persist in face of extinctions and invasive competitors? Ultimately, will these services be predicable by functional traits, in landscapes where shared evolutionary history is reduced? Strategies that help our understanding of the interactions and their role in the provision of services are urgent (Corlett 2011). Given this context, our objective here is to present the type of data that, if made available, could assist in determining the role of species in terms of the interactions they make and the provision of ecosystem services. Moreover, we aimed to elucidate how this role can be associated with functional traits. The current work focuses on the following groups: plants, birds, bats and bees (Fig. 1). Of particular interest are interactions involving: pollination, which is carried out predominantly by bees, but also by nectarivorous birds and bats; and seed dispersal, mainly carried out by frugivorous birds and bats. These interactions are mediated by key traits. In plants, common flower traits are the aperture, color, odor strength and type, shape orientation, size and symmetry, nectar guide and sexual organ, and reward. Fruit or seed traits, such as fleshy nutrient, chemical attractant and clinging structures, are also relevant for seed dispersal. In animals the most common traits are the body size (for bees, the intertegular distance; for bats, forearm length; and for birds, the weight), gape-width for birds and the feeding habit (nectarivorous, frugivorous, omnivorous) for bats and birds. Providing standardized data on traits involving interactions between fauna and flora is important to fill knowledge gaps, which could help in the decision making processes aiming conservation, restoration and management programs for protecting ecosystem services based on biodiversity.


Oikos ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kadambari Deshpande ◽  
Abi T. Vanak ◽  
M. Soubadra Devy ◽  
Jagdish Krishnaswamy

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petro Lakyda ◽  
Anatoly Shvidenko ◽  
Andrii Bilous ◽  
Viktor Myroniuk ◽  
Maksym Matsala ◽  
...  

Climate change continues to threaten forests and their ecosystem services while substantially altering natural disturbance regimes. Land cover changes and consequent management entail discrepancies in carbon sequestration provided by forest ecosystems and its accounting. Currently there is a lack of sufficient and harmonized data for Ukraine that can be used for the robust and spatially explicit assessment of forest provisioning and regulation of ecosystem services. In the frame of this research, we established an experimental polygon (area 45 km2) in Northern Ukraine aiming at estimating main forest carbon stocks and fluxes and determining the impact caused by natural disturbances and harvest for the study period of 2010–2015. Coupled field inventory and remote sensing data (RapidEye image for 2010 and SPOT 6 image for 2015) were used. Land cover classification and estimation of biomass and carbon pools were carried out using Random Forest and k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) method, respectively. Remote sensing data indicates a ca. 16% increase of carbon stock, while ground-based computations have shown only a ca. 1% increase. Net carbon fluxes for the study period are relatively even: 5.4 Gg C·year−1 and 5.6 Gg C C·year−1 for field and remote sensing data, respectively. Stand-replacing wildfires, as well as insect outbreaks and wind damage followed by salvage logging, and timber harvest have caused 21% of carbon emissions among all C sources within the experimental polygon during the study period. Hence, remote sensing data and non-parametric methods coupled with field data can serve as reliable tools for the precise estimation of forest carbon cycles on a regional spatial scale. However, featured land cover changes lead to unexpected biases in consistent assessment of forest biophysical parameters, while current management practices neglect natural forest dynamics and amplify negative impact of disturbances on ecosystem services.


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