Abstract
Loss of forest naturalness challenges the maintenance of green infrastructure (GI) for biodiversity conservation and delivery of diverse ecosystem services. Using the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi target #11 with its quantitative and qualitative criteria as a normative model, we aim at supporting landscape planning through a pioneering assessment of the extent to which existing amounts and spatial distributions of High Conservation Value Forests (HCVFs) meet these criteria. Highly forested and committed to both intensive wood production and evidence-based conservation targets of 17–20% protected areas, Sweden was chosen as a case study. Specifically, we estimated the amount, regional representation, and functional connectivity of HCVF patches using virtual bird species, validated the results using field surveys of focal bird species, and assessed conservation target fulfilment. Finally, we linked these results to the regional distribution of forest land ownership categories, and stress that these provide different opportunities for landscape planning. Even if 31% of forest land in Sweden is officially protected, voluntarily set-aside, or not used for wood production now and in the future, we show that applying the representation and connectivity criteria of Aichi target #11 reduces this figure to an effective GI of 12%. When disaggregating the five ecoregions the effective GI was 54% for the sub-alpine forest ecoregion, which hosts EU’s last intact forest landscapes, but only 3–8% in the other four ecoregions where wood production is predominant. This results in an increasing need for forest habitat and landscape restoration from north to south. The large regional variation in the opportunity for landscape planning stresses the need for a portfolio of different approaches. We stress the need to secure funding mechanisms for compensating land owners’ investments in GI, and to adapt both the approaches and spatial extents of landscape planning units to land ownership structure.
Highlights
Forest management has aimed to maximize economic revenue from timber, pulpwood and biomass (Puettmann, Coates, & Messier, 2012)
The large regional variation in the opportunity for landscape planning stresses the need for a portfolio of different approaches
In the sub-alpine ecoregion High Conservation Value Forests (HCVFs) still constitute a functional network of suitable habitat for the focal bird species that cannot cope with intensive forest management, this is generally not the case in the four lower altitude forest ecoregions that focus on high sustained yield wood production
Summary
Forest management has aimed to maximize economic revenue from timber, pulpwood and biomass (Puettmann, Coates, & Messier, 2012). A long-term focus on high sustained yield wood production has caused loss and simplification of once naturally dynamic forests in many European regions (Sabatini et al, 2018) This has negative consequences for biodiversity conservation and delivery of a diverse range of Landscape and Urban Planning 202 (2020) 103838 ecosystem services (e.g., IPBES, 2019; see : Eyvindson, Repo, & Mönkkönen, 2018; Svensson, Andersson, Sandström, Mikusiński, & Jonsson, 2019; Triviño et al, 2015). The European continent’s northern conifer-dominated forests are highly relevant for comparative studies of this widespread pattern This is because they simultaneously host the last intact forest landscapes in Europe (Potapov et al, 2008), and landscapes dominated by forests aimed at wood production with very high forest management intensity (Angelstam et al, 2018; Kuhmonen, Mikkola, Storrank, & Lindholm, 2017; Naumov et al, 2018)
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