Abstract
Humans require multiple services from ecosystems, but it is largely unknown whether trade-offs between ecosystem functions prevent the realisation of high ecosystem multifunctionality across spatial scales. Here, we combined a comprehensive dataset (28 ecosystem functions measured on 209 forest plots) with a forest inventory dataset (105,316 plots) to extrapolate and map relationships between various ecosystem multifunctionality measures across Europe. These multifunctionality measures reflected different management objectives, related to timber production, climate regulation and biodiversity conservation/recreation. We found that trade-offs among them were rare across Europe, at both local and continental scales. This suggests a high potential for ‘win-win’ forest management strategies, where overall multifunctionality is maximised. However, across sites, multifunctionality was on average 45.8-49.8% below maximum levels and not necessarily highest in protected areas. Therefore, using one of the most comprehensive assessments so far, our study suggests a high but largely unrealised potential for management to promote multifunctional forests.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 31-42 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Ecology Letters |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 15 Nov 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jan 2018 |
Funding
This paper is a joint effort of the working group ‘Scaling biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relations: a synthesis based on the FunDivEUROPE research platforms’ on the 24th–26th November 2014 in Leipzig, Germany, kindly supported by sDiv, the Synthesis Centre of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, funded by the German Research Foundation (FZT 118). The FunDi-vEUROPE project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 265171. We thank the MAGRAMA for access to the Spanish Forest Inventory, the Johann Heinrich von Thu€nen-Institut for access to the German National Forest Inventories, the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE) for making the Finnish NFI data available, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences for making the Swedish NFI data available, and Hugues Lecomte, from the Walloon Forest Inventory, for access to the Walloon NFI data. The study was supported by the TRY initiative on plant traits (http://www.trydb.org). The TRY initiative and database is hosted, developed and maintained at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany. TRY is/has been supported by DIVERSITAS, IGBP, the Global Land Project, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through its program QUEST (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System), the French Foundation for Biodiversity Research (FRB), and GIS ‘Climat, Environnement et Société’ France.
Funders | Funder number |
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DIVERSITAS | |
Environnement et Société’ France | |
European Union’s Seventh Programme | |
FP7/2007 | |
French Foundation for Biodiversity Research | |
GIS ‘Climat | |
IGBP | |
Synthesis Centre of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research | |
Seventh Framework Programme | 265171 |
Natural Environment Research Council | |
National Eye Research Centre | |
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | FZT 118 |
Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversite | |
iDiv |
Keywords
- Biodiversity
- FunDivEUROPE
- climate
- ecosystem multifunctionality
- ecosystem services
- forest
- large-scale
- phylogenetic diversity
- tree communities
- upscaling