Native forest fragments as critical bird habitat in a softwood forest landscape

Onnia triquetra (Pers.) Imazeki, a pine associated polypore species reported for the first time from Hungary

“…It is often assumed, that tree plantations impoverish local flora and fauna; however, proper forest management can improve the balance between sustainable biodiversity and timber production (Hartley 2002). In case of non-indigenous gymnosperm plantations, both negative (Török and Tóth 1996;Mack et al 2000;Magura et al 2000;Brockerhoff et al 2003;Cseresnyés and Tamás 2014) and positive (Fisher and Goldney 1998;Brockerhoff et al 2003) impacts on natural biodiversity have been observed, related to different ecological and management qualities of the stands.…”

Insights in forest structural diversity indicators with machine learning: what is indicated?

“…Random forest models are composed from regression trees and are trained to predict the values of five structural diversity indicators. We are using the statistical language R (R Core Team 2020) with the packages randomForest (Breiman 2001(Breiman , 2002, VSURF (Geneuer (Kohyama 1993;Yachi and Loreau 2007;Álvarez-Yépiz et al 2017;Atkins et al 2018) The variation of tree spacing provides an indication of the size and distribution of gaps (Neumann and Starlinger 2001) and thus indirectly on processes such as mortality, ingrowth, and competition (Svensson and Jeglum 2001) Shannon Index Tree species abundance can be used as a proxy for habitat quality or biotope trees (Heym et al 2021) and related microhabitats (Larrieu et al 2014) or habitat types (Kovac et al 2020); e.g., saproxylic beetles, bryophytes, lichens, fungi, and arthropods (Uliczka and Angelstam 1999;Brändle and Brandl 2001;Berglund et al 2009; Ulyshen 2011) There is high scientific evidence for a positive relation between tree species diversity and the number of bird (Baguette et al 1994;Fisher and Goldney 1998), ground beetle (Fahy and Gormally 1998;Davis et al 2000;Magura et al 2000), arthropod (Chey et al 1997) and ground vegetation species (Fahy and Gormally 1998;Humphrey et al 2002) Tree species richness is a proxy for the number of niche spaces filled by different tree species (Turnbull et al 2016) Stand Density Index…”