Ecological mechanisms underpinning species diversity changes along land-use intensity in temperate forests - from trees to landscapes

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Current understanding of how forest heterogeneity influences the diversity of taxa remains limited. Only incremental advances have been made since the 1960s when MacArthur and MacArthur laid the foundation for the habitat-heterogeneity-hypothesis, by showing how increased forest foliage height diversity increases the species diversity of birds by increasing the range of available niches. We do not know how a broader range of taxa responds to variations in forest structural and compositional attributes. Given that land-use change and forest management activities alter the structure and composition of forests, it is critical that we build deeper understanding of heterogeneity-diversity linkages to better inform biodiversity conservation. Advances in remote sensing of forest three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneity and developments in the construction of trait databases and phylogenies for different taxa now enable these linkages to be made - under the appropriate experimental setting. The Biodiversity-Exploratories provides an ideal research platform to address these challenges and it is now possible to set up a globally outstanding framework to test the role of forest structure driven by land-use intensity on biodiversity in temperate forests. Our consortium aims to expose the main drivers of biodiversity in forests, identify the mechanisms underpinning species changes along land-use gradients, and establish a general framework for 3D heterogeneity and biodiversity relationships. Our objectives are to: i) compile existing data in the Biodiversity-Exploratories for eight different taxa; ii) expand and develop trait and phylogenetic dissimilarities for these taxa; iii) calculate a range of forest structure variables along different axes of forest heterogeneity from airborne LiDAR; iv) scale important heterogeneity metrics to the regional landscape in which the Biodiversity-Exploratories are embedded with space-borne RADAR; v) elucidate the influence of local plot and regional landscape structure on species diversity; and vi) expand this research to two other forest types representing unique long gradients of land-use intensity in montane to high montane forests and in colline beech forests in Central Europe.