Biodiversity maintenance in forest landscapes is currently acknowledged to be a central component of sustainable development. The latest issue of Ecological Bulletins, published in cooperation with the journals Oikos and Ecography, contains no less than 38 papers dealing with this topic, written by a large variety of authors from a range of stakeholder groups, including professional ecologists, policy makers, foresters and even a well-known home furnishing company. As stated by the editors in an introductory paper, the main aim of this book is the development of scientifically-founded performance targets and management-planning tools for the maintenance of forest biodiversity in boreal and mountain forests.
The book is divided into five sections, all starting with an introductory paper. In the first section, different stakeholders express their views about balancing biodiversity concerns and wood production. The second section contains only three papers and deals with understanding human influence on forest biodiversity, although natural disturbance regimes and successional dynamics are also discussed. In the third section, introduced by an interesting review of threshold detection, ecologists present the results of their search for habitat area thresholds for different animal species, most of them birds. Without monitoring tools such as indicator species, it is, of course, impossible to know whether formulated biodiversity targets are met. This issue is covered in the fourth section, while the fifth section elaborates this topic by presenting practical examples of assessment methods for the achievement of a certain conservation criterion. In a concluding article, a practical six-step procedure is presented for identifying thresholds to be used in the determination of forest management targets. The authors propose the establishment of international, multi-disciplinary teams (adaptive management teams) to test the elaborated procedure for different regions.
The three editors are to be congratulated on the enormous task of compiling these 36 papers. For policy makers and forest and landscape managers especially, this volume contains an excellent overview of available tools and possible targets for forest biodiversity management. The concluding chapter offers an interesting framework to start managing forest biodiversity. Do not expect a ready-to-use manual, but a well balanced and pragmatic elucidation of procedure requiring a multidisciplinary team. Too many conservation articles these days urge for such a multidisciplinary approach without giving any clue of how this should be accomplished in practice. This volume and the final paper in particular, offer a very useful initial framework.
Inevitably, there are also minor criticisms. It is not always clear how some of the chapters contribute to the specified objectives of the book, or more specifically, to the presented procedure for establishing conservation targets. This is probably not the fault of the editors. Although they share a vision of the topic or outcome of a volume, this vision is not necessarily shared by all the contribution authors. Therefore, the editors should be encouraged to elaborate their ideas developed in the final chapter in a more synoptic regular book containing a review of the most relevant literature. As a plant ecologist, I was also somewhat disappointed with the very few papers dealing with plant, bryophyte or lichen diversity; the last two constitute a considerable part of the boreal forest species diversity. The third section, on the effects of boreal forest fragmentation, only focuses on animal occurrence and abundance. It is known, however, that plant species are also susceptible to habitat fragmentation, and recent research suggests that species with long generation times are prone to suffer from the so-called extinction debt. This implies that the spatial distribution of lichens and bryophytes is likely to mirror historical forest configuration rather than that in the present and that large-scale extinctions are to be expected.
The volume is very carefully edited, although the very rigid journal-like style is not always appealing to the reader. What I most missed was an index, a major shortcoming in such a huge volume mainly intended as a reference work. Nevertheless, this work belongs on the book shelf of everyone concerned with managing boreal and mountain forest biodiversity.
