The Continental Impact of European Forest Conservation Policy and Management on Productivity Stability

Abstract

The ecological impact of continental scale land-use policies that influence forest management is often difficult to quantify. European forest conservation began in 1909 with a marked increase in designated areas with the inception of Natura 2000 in the early 1990s. It has been shown that increases in European forest mortality may be linked to climate variability. Measuring productivity response to climate variability may be a valid proxy indicating a forest’s ability to bear this disturbance. Net Primary Production (NPP) response to climate variability has also been linked to functional diversity within forests. Using a European specific annual MODIS NPP estimates, we assess the NPP response to climate variability differences between actively managed forests, which experience human interventions and conserved, Protected Area (PA) forests with minimal to no human impact. We found, on the continental scale, little to no differences in NPP response between managed and conserved forests. However, on the regional scale, differences emerge that are driven by the historic forest management practices and the potential speciation of the area. Northern PA forests show the same NPP response to climate variability as their actively managed counter parts. PA forests tend to have less NPP response to climate variability in the South and in older conserved forests. As the time a forest has been designated, as a PA, extends past its typically actively managed rotation length, greater differences begin to emerge between the two management types.

Remotely sensed effectiveness assessments of protected areas lack a common framework: A review

“…The effectiveness of protected areas was the main focus of studies on rare occasions, and very few studies set out a clear description or definition of how they conceptualized effectiveness (Beresford et al, 2013, 2018; Tang et al, 2011); instead, most of them defined the effectiveness of protected areas as the ability to sustain biodiversity, mostly in terms of selected species (Bonilla‐Mejia & Higuera‐Mendieta, 2019; Friedlander et al, 2007; Joseph et al, 2009; Kintz et al, 2006; Knorn et al, 2012; Lui & Coomes, 2016; Moreno et al, 2019; Rioja‐Nieto et al, 2015; Schulte to Buehne et al, 2017; Xie et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2017). One of the included papers, Tang et al (2011), described the effectiveness of protected areas as the ability to “[maintain] ecological functioning” and divided ecological effectiveness into two subfunctions: one part concentrating on existing biodiversity features in protected areas, the other part asking “how well [do] these areas maintain the biodiversity features[?…”

“…The selection of similar characteristics to match points inside and outside of protected areas was adapted to the subject of interest: In studies on land cover change, characteristics that might have an impact on land cover change were used to select suitable comparison points (Beresford et al, 2013(Beresford et al, , 2018. The same idea, using characteristics possibly influencing the study subject, was used in other studies for habitat types (Brink et al, 2016) and forest canopy cover (Blackman et al, 2015;Bragina et al, 2015;Moreno et al, 2019;Ren et al, 2015).…”

“…Since the turn of the century, the paradigm of protected area effectiveness has shifted from studies solely focusing on the conservation of biodiversity toward an increasing integration of human well‐being (Nagendra et al, 2010; Naughton‐Treves et al, 2005; Nelson & Chomitz, 2011). Protected areas should be perceived more as functional, intact ecosystems on a regional scale rather than areas with strict use constraints and hard borders (Knorn et al, 2012; Moreno et al, 2019). This would encourage critics who warn against isolating protected areas too much from one another and who instead advocate for integrated protected landscapes (DeFries et al, 2010; Southworth et al, 2004)—exemplified in the land‐sharing/land‐sparing debate (Fischer et al, 2014; von Wehrden et al, 2014).…”

Tool for Measuring Productivity in Software Development Teams

“…Ishizaka et al [2] stated that, considering the current increasingly globalized context and the huge amount of data present in the daily life of a company, decision-makers have more than ever the need to manage their business efficiently and productively. For this reason, the theme has been discussed in works from different contexts, such as academy [3,4], computing [5], public services [6], economics [7,8], forest conservation [9], and software development teams [10][11][12][13][14].…”

Sequential PCA-based Classification of Mediterranean Forest Plants using Airborne Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

“…Implementation of efficient classification and mapping of forest plant species can contribute to forest monitoring and management [53][54][55][56][57]. However, this is a challenging task for most classification methodologies, particularly in the case of dense Mediterranean forests, which are highly diverse in species and contain many functionally and structurally similar species.…”