Ecological and economic consequences of aggregating conservation sites and multiuse forests

Abstract

Intensive forest management has fragmented forest landscapes and decreased biodiversity and crucial ecosystem services. Current conservation and management efforts have not been sufficient and more efficient landscape level planning is needed to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services in forest landscapes. One efficient way to improve the species survival and the maintenance of multiple benefits in forest landscapes may be applying an approach where a part (e.g. third or half) of the total area is managed as multiuse landscapes within which e.g. a third of the area is be protected [third-of-third (1), or third-of-half (2)]. Aggregated networks of protected habitats are expected to safeguard population’s viability better than small and isolated habitats. Moreover, multiuse forests may support the protected sites and maintain multiple ecosystem services better than forests managed only for timber production. We explore the ecological and economic consequences of this approach by applying forest simulations of a wide variety of alternative management practices over 100 years in Finnish forest landscapes covering in total 46 000 hectares. To find the best areas for protection and multiuse landscapes, we run prioritizations of forest stands based on habitat availability of different indicator species by applying planning software Zonation. We create different scenarios in which forests are managed based on different combinations of objectives which are spatially aggregated or not. The objectives are: production (timber values), multiuse (delivery of multiple ecosystem services) and conservation (no management, total protection). Different shares and combinations of the above objectives allow us to explore the ecological and economic consequences of managing the part of forests based on conservation and multiuse objectives, as well as the effect of aggregating them. We hypothesize that 1) there are ecological benefits and economical costs in managing part of the forests based on conservation and multiuse objectives, and 2) aggregating conservation sites and multiuse forests spatially increases the ecological benefits and decreases the economic costs of them. Our results will provide knowledge about the applicability of the third-of-half approach for planners and managers.

(1) Hanski I. 2011. Habitat Loss, the Dynamics of Biodiversity, and a Perspective on Conservation. Ambio 40(3):248-255.

(2) Kotiaho, J. S. 2017. On effective biodiversity conservation, sustainability of bioeconomy, and honesty of the Finnish forest policy. Annales Zoologici Fennici 54, 13-25.