Pan-European forest biodiversity monitoring through the ICP-level I network. First results from the BIOSOIL-BIODIVERSITY project

The Sustainable Development Goal 15 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims at "protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss". The EU Biodiversity Strategy contributes to the Goal 15 of the SDGs as its objective is to halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services in Europe. Forest ecosystems are some of the most biodiverse habitats. For this reason, it is very important to specifically monitor temporal and spatial trends of biodiversity in order to find those areas more affected by biodiversity loss and to guide land management and conservation actions. A vast monitoring program covering the comprehensive concept of biodiversity would be impossible or at least financially prohibitive. Thus a successful and statistically rigorous monitoring program able to track changes over time and space must be based on indicators. Even if scientists have investigated a large number of compositional and structural biodiversity indicators, a clear consensus on the definition of the best set of indicators was not yet reached. In the framework of the two-years long BioSoil Forest Biodiversity Demonstration Project a large set of field data and information was acquired. The database includes data and information on living trees, deadwood and a complete vegetation survey. On the basis of raw data we calculated several forest biodiversity indicators and analysed their inter-relationships, and their variation in different forest types and environmental conditions. The analysis contributes to advance our knowledge towards the selection of an adequate set of forest biodiversity indicators to support the characterization of European Forest Types. The results provide a fundamental and consistent support for the future implementation of multi-scale assessments of forest biodiversity

Mapping forest condition in Europe: Methodological developments in support to forest biodiversity assessments

Forest condition, biodiversity, and ecosystem services are strongly interlinked. The biodiversity levels depend to a large extent on the integrity, health, and vitality of forests at the same time as losses of forest biodiversity lead to decreased forest productivity and sustainability. Under this conceptual framework, this study presents a methodology for mapping forest condition at European scale supporting the attainment of the 2020 Aichi Biodiversity Target 5 “the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests, is at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero, and degradation and fragmentation is significantly reduced” and the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as well as the EU forest strategy since the sustainable forest management is oriented to support the provision of forest services and to enhance the condition of biodiversity forests’ host. The work presents the developments of an operational indicator at European scale. This spatially explicit information on forest condition can be the baseline map with a 1 km resolution to monitor the state and changes of condition by exposition to pressures and threats. This condition indicator considers structural, functional, and compositional aspects of forest with relevance for health and vitality of species and habitats hosted by forest ecosystems. The methodology implemented used harmonized, published and open datasets. It provided confident results for the assessment of the condition within hemiboreal, temperate and alpine forests, showing the Carpathian, Dinaric Alps and Alps, among others, as hotspots with pre-dominantly good condition. The results were validated with data derived from the reporting for the EU Habitat Directive and explicit dataset on known primary forests in Europe. However, this method underestimated the forest condition in the Mediterranean and Boreal forest types due to data gaps, regional specific characteristics, and design limitations. (...)This work is part of the support provided by the European Topic Centre on Urban Land and Soil Systems (ETC/ULS) to European Environment Agency. The authors thank JI Barredo and M Erhard for the discussions and FM Sabatini and the Forest and CO project that facilitated the access to the datasets and provide support during the methodology development. Finally, we want to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which contributed to improving the manuscript. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA