Abstract
The consequences of silviculture and management on the genetic variation and structure of long-impacted populations of forest tree are reviewed assessed and discussed, using Mediterranean forests as a working paradigm. The review focuses on silviculture and management systems, regeneration schemes, the consequences of coppicing and coppice conversion to high forest, the effects of fragmentation and exploitation, and the genetic impact of forestry plantations. It emerges that averaging genetic diversity parameters, such as those typically reported in the assessment of forest population genetics, do not generally present significant differences between populations under certain silvicultural systems/forest management methods and “control” populations. Observed differences are usually rather subtler and regard the structure of the genetic variation and the lasting adaptive potential of natural forest tree populations. Therefore, forest management and silvicultural practices have a longer-term impact on the genetic diversity and structure and resilience of long-impacted populations of forest tree; their assessment should be based on parameters that are sensitive to population perturbations and bottlenecks. The nature and extent of genetic effects and impact of silviculture and forest management practices, call for a concerted effort regarding their thorough study using genetic, genomic, as well as monitoring approaches, in order to provide insight and potential solutions for future silviculture and management regimes.
Highlights
Genetic diversity is a crucial biodiversity component that allows species to adapt to local conditions and to evolve in new environments, while securing their long-term adaptive potential, especially under an era of global change
Mattioni et al [48] have identified weak differences in two-locus allelic correlations between naturalized stands (“natural” stands which originated from abandoned anthropogenically managed populations, most likely old orchards) and coppice forests in a linkage disequilibrium analysis. They suggested that long-standing management methods could affect the population genetic composition, their results may have possibly been inflated by one-locus disequilibria that could not be assessed by the dominant inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers that they used
Silviculture and forest management systems have an influence on the genetic variation and structure of the populations of forest trees
Summary
Genetic diversity is a crucial biodiversity component that allows species to adapt to local conditions and to evolve in new environments, while securing their long-term adaptive potential, especially under an era of global change. Forest management and silvicultural practices, such as the harvesting system, artificial and natural regeneration, regulation of species mixtures, thinning, and harvesting operations, regeneration planting and management, forest conversion schemes, etc., may impact local environmental conditions and population spatial demographic structure [2,3]. In this respect, they could influence stand population genetics and exercise a potentially strong effect on the major evolutionary forces at microscale of selection, gene flow, mating systems and genetic drift [1,2,4]. It has altered progressive forest succession and original forest composition and structure [14]
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