Woodland key habitats evaluated as a part of a functional reserve network

Anne Laita, Mikko Mönkkönen, Janne S. Kotiaho
Biological Conservation 143 (2010)

http://bit.ly/L0SNoi

The article was important in several ways:
First of all it clarifies and underlines important issues and facts that are familiar to us working with conservation biology but for example in commercial forest scene they might be stranger. In our opinion the most meaningful and useful audience for a paper like this right now is most probably for example Finnish forestry people to whom those ecological based well-known facts might have been strangers. We were happy to read from discussion many kinds of suggestions and ideas that could benefit the biodiversity and the longevity of woodland key habitats such as buffer zones.

Species do no distribute themselves only systematically. We wondered how the size of areas affects the results. And we would like to point out that there are some studies that show that it is the quality of the habitat patch that matters before connectivity so that if the quality is good the connectivity increases (Hodgson et al.??) Because the affect of the area had been left out we wondered could there be soon another article with the areas? It would be interesting to see the effect.

The article had surprisingly much writing errors and unclearness in figures and tables. That gave us an expression that it wasn’t written with a very serious feeling even though we thought that the subject and the possible impact of the article would be important. We understood though that the researchers wanted to show all possible numbers openly to make the discussion more transparent. Also we were quite surprised about the references used: they seemed maybe a little bit outdated, many of them rapports or books and they were quite few. But this article was written of very important topic from very important view and we thought this was almost like a popularisation on science that is often needed.

We like the fact that Woodland key habitats are considered here as an addition of already existing reservation network. To be able to keep our minds in the contexts we were hoping to read something about the old matrix and the condition of the nature before. What we couldn’t find out was how much has the different habitat types lost of their distribution when comparing the situation today and in past. We wondered as well how much the matrix has changed during the time: is it now more hostile than before?

We would like to also remind of the “well known fact” that all additions of /for conservation reservation areas are beneficial for the conservation. But the bigger question is that how much is enough to retain the favourable level of conservation. And it’s always better to conserve than not to conserve. We were left with a desire to see what would have been the third option.

Some notes were left floating in the air…

The profit gained varies among different species.

This article does not use any population dynamic modelling or doesn’t deal with rescue effect.
——————————
Journal Club 26.11.2010
——————————
ps. By now (20.4.2012) Anne Laita has defended her thesis in University of Jyväskylä (The Opponent was MRG’s Otso Ovaskainen) with the exiting title “Conservation in space”.