Abstract
The conservation and sustainable use of forests and forest genetic resources (FGR) is a challenging task for scientists and foresters. Forest management practices can affect diversity on various levels: genetic, species, and ecosystem. Understanding past natural disturbance dynamics and their level of dependence on human disturbances and management practices is essential for the conservation and management of FGR, especially in the light of climate change. In this review, forest management practices and their impact on genetic composition are reviewed, synthesized, and interpreted in the light of existing national and international forest monitoring schemes and concepts from various European projects. There is a clear need and mandate for forest genetic monitoring (FGM), while the requirements thereof lack complementarity with existing forest monitoring. Due to certain obstacles (e.g., the lack of unified FGM implementation procedures across the countries, high implementation costs, large number of indicators and verifiers for FGM proposed in the past), merging FGM with existing forest monitoring is complicated. Nevertheless, FGM is of paramount importance for forestry and the natural environment in the future, regardless of the presence or existence of other monitoring systems, as it provides information no other monitoring system can yield. FGM can provide information related to adaptive and neutral genetic diversity changes over time, on a species and/or on a population basis and can serve as an early warning system for the detection of potentially harmful changes of forest adaptability. In addition, FGM offers knowledge on the adaptive potential of forests under the changing environment, which is important for the long-term conservation of FGR.
Highlights
Forest management (FM) practices affect diversity on various levels: genetic, individual, population, species, and ecosystem [1,2,3,4]
A number of other national target developmental projects and tasks have been dedicated to pave the way for forest genetic monitoring (FGM) at the national scale [32,33,34,35,36,37]. This high number of ongoing initiatives confirms the importance of the topic and the need for the implementation of FGM, especially under climate change when monitoring the adaptiveness of trees, stands, and ecosystems is of paramount importance [38,39,40]
A particular result from the studies reviewed with a focus on forest management shows how contrarily management can affect the genetic and demographic structure of forest stands, calling for genetic monitoring in order to study the effects of all these different management systems
Summary
Forest management (FM) practices affect diversity on various levels: genetic, individual, population, species, and ecosystem [1,2,3,4]. A detailed understanding of past disturbance dynamics and their relationship to human disturbances and management practices is essential for monitoring forest ecosystems exclusively in the light of predicted climate change [17,18,19] By itself, this detailed understanding can be achieved only through FGM that will capitalize on the knowledge regarding existing FM practices in Europe and their impact on genetic diversity. A number of other national target developmental projects and tasks have been dedicated to pave the way for FGM at the national scale [32,33,34,35,36,37] This high number of ongoing initiatives confirms the importance of the topic and the need for the implementation of FGM, especially under climate change when monitoring the adaptiveness of trees, stands, and ecosystems is of paramount importance [38,39,40]. (ii) evaluate the effects of these practices on genetic variation of forest stands and subsequently the need for genetic monitoring under different forest management types, (iii) gather and collate the existing forest monitoring information in Europe, and (iv) discuss the compatibility of the existing forest monitoring systems with the requirements of forest genetic monitoring
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