Tuesday 16.2.2010 at Coffeeroom (Anni, Johanna, Joona, Laura, Ninni)

In this paper the authors had used meta-analysis to review 49 published papers containing 120 comparisons of species richness between unmanaged and managed forests in Europe. Articles were chosen from year 1978 to 2007 and that obviously makes the comparison more challenging because of the different methods and styles used in a different times.

Results of the meta-analyses were quite thin if we compare them to what was expected (and that is that the biodiversity would be much greater in unmanaged forests). Species richness was used as a surrogate for biodiversity which could have been weighted differently. Now all that mattered was just the number of species. Results showed us that species richness was only slightly higher in unmanaged forests. Forest management had positive impact on vascular plants and negative impact on species which are dependent on forest cover continuity, deadwood or large trees as well as carabids.

It was said that some areas in Europe were badly represented so it would have been great to see the studying areas in a visible map. But maybe it would just have turned our thoughts away from the main issue: what do the comparisons tell us, and made us stuck with the fact that this kind of comparable information is not available everywhere. We as finns were able to be proud because the whole Scandinavia was well presented. The problem can be that there is no such a research done which would study this issue locally or the research is not a comparable one – it just studies biodiversity of one area but not with right meters or the results are in some other way incomparable.

Even though we agreed that the article didn’t give a lot of food for our thoughts we think it was a great opening for the discussion that articles (or the results) could be represented in a more congruent way, so that they could give benefit to a more extensive research too than just to authors’ own work. Authors pointed out well why this kind of reviewing is important and what kind of details, aspects or data etc. are missing from today’s scientific research work so that the weaknesses in articles and in meta-analyses could be sorted out. This hopely motivates people to continue this work even it now didn’t show much big results.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123243232/PDFSTART

Biodiversity Differences between Managed and Unmanaged Forests: Meta-Analysis of Species Richness in Europe

YOAN PAILLET, LAURENT BERGÈS, JOAKIM HJÄLTÉN, PÉTER ÓDOR, CATHERINE AVON, MARKUS BERNHARDT-RÖMERMANN, RIENK-JAN BIJLSMA, LUC DE BRUYN, MARC FUHR, ULF GRANDIN, ROBERT KANKA, LARS LUNDIN, SANDRA LUQUE, TIBOR MAGURA, SILVIA MATESANZ, ILONA MÉSZÁROS, M.-TERESA SEBASTIÀ, WOLFGANG SCHMIDT, TIBOR STANDOVÁR, BÉLA TÓTHMÉRÉSZ, ANNELI UOTILA, FERNANDO VALLADARES, KAI VELLAK, RISTO VIRTANEN

Conservation Biology, Volume 24 Issue 1 (February 2010)