- Anthropogenic climate and land use change pose threats to biodiversity. For example, timber production is altering forest ecosystems worldwide, often resulting in climate-sensitive monocultures. In central Europe, ongoing climate change has resulted in a large-scale dieback of spruce plantations, raising concerns about the appropriate management of such sites.
- Here, we investigated the direct and indirect effects of forest management on epigeal spider diversity in a disturbed, spruce-dominated forest landscape in western Germany. We compared five management strategies and evaluated the impact of various environmental variables on taxonomic spider diversity as well as community and functional composition.
- Forest management directly affected spider diversity, with lowest values found in spruce stands and highest in salvage-logged and succession sites. Spider abundance was negatively related to canopy closure, and spider diversity positively to deadwood occurrence on-site and at the landscape scale. Community composition differed strongly among management regimes, with the highest number of forest specialists occurring in deadwood stands and of open landscape species on clear cuts.
- Our results highlight the role of non-intervention sites as refuges for forest spiders in a highly disturbed forest landscape, while salvage-logged sites showed the highest overall spider diversity. Based on the occurrence of highly distinct spider assemblages among management regimes, our results stress the importance of landscape heterogeneity for spider diversity.
- Forest management should therefore be planned at a landscape rather than stand-scale. By applying intervention and non-intervention strategies, large-scale spruce monocultures may be transformed into diverse forest landscapes with beneficial effects for both biodiversity and forestry.
Plath, E., Böhme, W., Fischer, D., Griebel, L., Jochims, K., Schreek, K., Thiem, C., & Fischer, K. Spider diversity in a disturbed forest landscape highlights the importance of management heterogeneity. Insect Conservation and Diversity. https://doi.org/10.1111/icad.12815
