Natural disturbance regime and habitat diversity in pristine forests landscapes (eastern part of Barents Region)

Abstract

The boreal forests provides a number of crucial ecosystem services. Unmanaged boreal forests displays high variability in structure and dynamics, which is important for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Preserving structural heterogeneity of forest cover, observed in natural ecosystems, can be accomplished by forest management following spatial and temporal patterns of natural disturbances. In contrast, traditional forestry aims at creating structurally homogenous mono-cohort stands with low biodiversity. Forest structure, successional pathways, and the disturbance regimes all change along topographic and climate gradients. It follows that nature-adapted forestry practices should reflect the differences in disturbance regimes and follow region-specific set of rules. Successful development of sustainable forest management policies is contingent upon accumulating empirical and region-specific data on natural dynamics of forests where natural dynamics still dominates. Majority of studies in this field has been done in North America, while similar studies on Russian boreal forests are limited. We argue that policies currently adopted in Canada and aimed at preservation of biodiversity in the landscapes just partially affected by forestry operations may be relevant in the Russian context. Efficient development of new forestry practices is seriously hampered by insufficient and poorly quantified information on the relationships between disturbance regimes and biodiversity, and quantitative information of the historical rates of variability in disturbance regimes themselves. Parametrizing disturbance regimes commonly involves disentangling effects of several disturbance factors, such as forest fires, insect outbreaks, and wind and extreme climate conditions. It follows that inventory of natural forest cover prior to the onset of forestry operations is of critical importance since it helps to obtain preliminary assessment of the scale of natural disturbance events and its distribution across the landscape in question. To this end, adequate inventory should help identify valuable habitats which may have experienced disturbance regimes which differed from regimes experienced by the majority of the studied landscape. To obtain this information for eastern part of Barents region, we studied habitat diversity and disturbance regimes of the pristine forests landscapes[1].The forested watershed are richly inhabited by endangered plant, fungi and vertebrate species, many of which are red listed. The forests exhibit high diversity of natural ecosystems and can be viewed as a representative example of the European middle and northern taiga with preserved gradient of different successional stages and habitat types. 1.Zagidullina A.Assesment of large scale disturbances regimes in intact forest landscapes/Natural and historical factors of development of actual ecosystems of Ural region,2017,Yaksha