Lichens are a key component of forest biodiversity. However, a comprehensive study analyzing lichen species richness in relation to several management types, extending over different regions and forest stages and including information on site conditions is missing for temperate European forests. In three German regions (Schwäbische Alb, Hainich-Dün, Schorfheide-Chorin), the so-called Biodiversi...

This review aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about human health, global change, and biodiversity by concentrating on the relationships between forests and human health. This review gives a short overview of the most important health benefits that forests provide to humans, and the risks that forests may pose to human health. Furthermore, it discusses the future challenges for the re...

The Carpathians are Eastern Europe’s largest contiguous forest ecosystem and a hotspot of biodiversity. However, not much is known about changes in species diversity in these forests. Here we investigate the long-time changes in the diversity of plant communities in the Eastern Carpathian beech forests. We also inquire about the similarity of plant communities between managed and protected fore...

The woody communities of seven of the most intact bottomland hardwood forests of southeastern Louisiana are described. The seven forests are on old levee ridges associated with past distributaries of the Mississippi River. The communities were divided by diameter size class into overstory (~10.0 cm dbh) and understory (3.0 cm 2 10.0 cm dbh). The overstory (27 species) and understory (24 species...

Temperate forests receive some of the highest rates of nitrogen (N) deposition in the world. While numerous studies have investigated the effects of N enrichment on forests, there is little consensus on why some forests become N saturated while others do not. To investigate this, we used a multi-factor metaanalysis to simultaneously estimate the relative importance of several environmental, exp...

The most popular approach for analyzing survival data is the Cox regression model. The Cox model may, however, be misspecified, and its proportionality assumption is not always fulfilled. An alternative approach is random forests for survival outcomes. The standard split criterion for random survival forests is the log-rank test statistics, which favors splitting variables with many possible sp...

Fire has become a common feature in tropical drained peatlands, and it may have detrimental impacts on the overall biodiversity of the forest ecosystem. We investigated the effect of fire on termite and ant assemblages and the importance of remnant forest in restoring species diversity in fire-impacted tropical peat swamp forests. The species loss of both termites and ants was as high as 50% in...

Tropical forests play a crucial role in regulating regional and global climate dynamics, and model projections suggest that rapid climate change may result in forest dieback or savannization. However, these predictions are largely based on results from leaf-level studies. How tropical forests respond and feedback to climate change is largely unknown at the ecosystem level. Several complementary...

Forests play an important role in environmental protection. There is a long history of protection forests in mountain areas, where they help to prevent soil erosion, landslides and avalanches, and where they are important in maintaining the water quality of rivers draining forested catchments. Special silvicultural methods are required to ensure that these forests are maintained indefinitely. F...

Aim There is increasing concern regarding sustainable management and restoration of planted forests, particuIarly in the Mediterranean Basin where pine species have been widely used. The aim of this study was to analyse the environmental and structural characteristics of Mediterranean planted pine forests in relation to natural pine forests. Specifically, we assessed recruitment and woody speci...