| Habitat fragmentation, degradation and loss are the greatest drivers of species extinctions and declines globally, and Swedish boreal forests make no exception. As a tool to decrease fragmentation, green infrastructure planning aims to improve the connectivity between habitat patches and provide core areas for biodiversity by conservation and restoration of habitats. As a part of their environmental policy, Sveaskog has established 37 so called Ecoparks across Sweden, covering 175 000 ha of forest land and managed to serve as landscapes of green infrastructure. At least half of the area of each Ecopark is managed with enhanced nature consideration, such as restoration, strict protection and set-asides, and the rest is used for forestry. In long-term, Ecoparks aim to support greater biodiversity than landscapes managed by "business as usual" (BAU) where normal silviculture dominates. BAU-managed landscapes often suffer from delimited availability of decaying wood, lack of natural disturbances and simplified tree species compositions due to high production goals. However, the effectiveness of the landscape approach to benefit biodiversity has yet to be properly assessed.
In this project, we will firstly compare the fungal communities between Ecoparks and BAU-landscapes with a hypothesis that Ecoparks sustain more diverse fungal communities than BAU-landscapes. Secondly, we will assess the effects of forest structures (deadwood, living trees) and management (protection, restoration, enhanced concern, forestry) at smaller scales (500 m, 100 m and 20 m zones and individual stumps) which enables an assessment of the importance of each spatial scale on the biodiversity and conservation of fungi. We will use DNA-sequencing as a tool to study fungal biodiversity, and three Ecoparks and two respective BAU areas as our study system. We have collected wood dust samples (n=260) in 2019 from systematically created 9 year old high stumps of pine and birch, and dry-frozen them for DNA-analyses. The data on surrounding tree stand structure in 20 m radius, stump characteristics and occurrences of fungal fruiting bodies on stumps have been collected in 2019. Sveaskog has provided data on stand characteristics on each landscape (forest age, conducted management operations, tree species composition etc). In 2021, we will DNA-sequence the wood dust samples, identify the fungal species and analyse the data. The results will be published in 2022. The study is a spin-off extension of a project funded by SLU and Oscar and Lili Lamms foundation (PhD grant 2019-2023: "The importance of green infrastructure for biodiversity of deadwood-dependent insects and fungi"), and will be published as a part of the PhD. The herein applied funding would enable much more reliable results in comparison to original study plan that included only fruiting body inventories, and would open up several future research possibilities including multitaxon assessments of landscape management.
The results of the project provide knowledge essential for landscape and green infrastructure planning in Sweden and globally, and is perfectly in line with the objectives of Stiftelsen Oskar och Lili Lamms Minne in 2020 to support nature conservation in a landscape context.
|