Abstract
BackgroundThe ecosystem services provided by forests are essential for societal well-being. Production forests are increasingly expected to provide a range of ecosystem services in addition to wood biomass, as well as the biodiversity upon which many of these services depend. Production forests can be managed using different methods that affect the habitat provided and the biodiversity supported. Clearcutting (CC) is a widely used forest management system that has been criticised due to its negative effects on biodiversity. Alternative less intensive forest management systems have been developed with the hope of producing comparable levels of biomass with fewer negative impacts on forest biodiversity. One of these alternatives is continuous cover forestry (CCF); a management system that always maintains tree cover in an uneven-aged production forest stand. Many studies have been conducted which contrast the effects of CCF and CC on biodiversity with varying results. The aim of the review is to explore how CCF system compares to CC in terms of outcomes for terrestrial forest biodiversity.MethodsDue to the diverse vocabulary used to describe CCF, a systematic search for terms was carried out and a comprehensive search string will be used to maximise the likelihood of finding all relevant papers. We will gather, summarise and synthesise primary field studies, both peer-reviewed and grey literature, from temperate and boreal forest comparing biodiversity in CCF and CC stands. Species richness and abundance of plants, animals and fungi will be used to conduct a meta-analysis. Other biodiversity indicators and indices will be used for a narrative synthesis. As the effects of forest management depend on local conditions, we place a special emphasis on exploring the influence of various effect modifiers.
Highlights
The ecosystem services provided by forests are essential for societal well-being
Forests provide ecosystem services that are essential for human well-being [1, 2] and sustainable forest management is the cornerstone of the maintenance of these services
Continuous cover forestry (CCF) is another silvicultural method that differs from CC and shelterwood systems, in that it always maintains tree cover and heterogeneous forest structure
Summary
Searching for articles We will follow the guidelines for systematic reviews in environmental management V.5.0, issued by the collaboration for environmental evidence [17]. Some general terms (e.g. alternative management, nature-oriented, ecosystem management, etc.) resulted in a large number of articles without relevance to the topic addressed We supplemented these terms with forest management specific terms (e.g. alternative silviculture, alternative harvest, etc.) to help ensure relevant literature was not excluded. The scoping work revealed that relatively few studies can be found when specific terms relevant to the study question components are used This stemmed from the inconsistent use of vocabulary among researchers when describing CCF and associated harvesting methods, rather than a lack of relevant literature. We systematically extracted all relevant terms used in papers that have reviewed the terminology [7, 11, 19, 20] This resulted in 64 unique terms (Additional file 2). Most of those terms consisted of several words, the first word indicating a cutting or management type and the
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