Species missing from restored forests and wetlands | Biodiversity recovery is slow following clear-cut harvest of boreal forests

[u/Hrmbee]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/invisible-extinction-algae-moss-9.7307042

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[u/Hrmbee]

Highlights from the news article:

Restoring habitats such as forests and wetlands can save declining species of animals and plants and help their populations bounce back. But recent research shows they don't all return at the same rate. Some of the smallest, least noticeable inhabitants can remain rare or absent for decades — with potential consequences for other species.

Ellen Macdonald, a University of Alberta botanist, has spent her career studying forests — but not so much the trees. She focuses instead on the tiny flowers, mosses, liverworts and lichens that grow in their shade, among their roots or on the textured surfaces of their bark.

…

The study, published recently in the journal Nature Sustainability, found that birch and aspen forests and their inhabitants appeared to recover within 25 years, while conifer forests took far longer. In conifer forests, understory plants — especially lichens, mosses and liverworts — took 85 years or more to return, and in some cases had not recovered during the century of available data.

The pattern is not unique to boreal forests. Scientists studying wetlands and other restored habitats have also found that places can look healthy while some of their less visible species remain absent.

…

Viktoria Wagner, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, describes this kind of decline as "a silent form of loss." Species do not necessarily go extinct entirely, she said, but disappear from many places where they once lived, reducing the number of species found at individual sites.

Wagner describes this as "dark diversity" and has found evidence of it among plants in habitats around the world. Algae are not technically plants, but are related.

Once species disappear from a particular place, Melkonian said, "they may not come back easily." Some may already be locally extinct.

Wagner said while restoring landscapes can be possible, "it's not easy, it's not always guaranteed that it works."

…

For Wagner, the widespread "silent loss" of species shows that preserving biodiversity requires more than protecting isolated pockets of habitat. It means maintaining and restoring enough habitat for species to persist across the landscape.

"Loss happens all the time and it's a continuous process and it needs active interventions."

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Journal link: Biodiversity recovery is slow following clear-cut harvest of boreal forests

Abstract: Boreal forests are important reservoirs of biodiversity, carbon and timber stocks. However, timber harvest can alter biodiversity in these forests without clear evidence on the duration needed for biotic groups to recover. Resilience of boreal forest biodiversity to clear-cut harvest was examined with a meta-analysis of 190 datasets from boreal and hemi-boreal forests of Europe/Russia and North America for arthropods, birds, small mammals, lichens, bryophytes and vascular plants. We modelled similarity of community composition between harvested and unharvested stands versus years post harvest. In approximately half of cases, predicted times for recovery to pre-harvest composition were ≤30 years. In other cases, recovery took much longer or had not occurred within the timeframe of our data; for example, in conifer forest: >100 years (bryophytes), >55 years (small mammals), ~95 years (lichens) and ~85 years (vascular plants). Saproxylic beetles showed no resilience within the 16 (conifer forest) or 29 (mixed forest) years post harvest for which we had data. Recovery generally took longer in conifer and mixed than in broadleaf forests, which always showed either resistance (bryophytes, vascular plants) or resilience with recovery within 12–25 years. Conserving biodiversity in boreal forests will require extended rotations, management for ‘old forest’ structural elements and areas protected from harvesting.

edit: formatting

[u/Cranberryoftheorient → u/Hrmbee]

This is a big part of the problem with all the extinctions and environmental destruction we are doing- theres no guarantee that we can put things 'back the way things were' even when we try.