A European platform of forest multi-taxon biodiversity

摘要: Forests cover almost 40% of the European Union territory [1], and, with 75 forest types [2] and 81 habitats (Directive 43/92/CE), are crucial for the conservation of biodiversity in Europe. However, only 24% of European forests are protected [1], and 0.7% of them are primary forests [3]. These figures underline why the maintenance of forest biodiversity in the European Union is based on the concept of sustainable forest management (SFM). Despite this, about 80% of the forest habitat types are in an unfavourable conservation status, and forest management is reported as their main pressure [4]. The existing SFM indicators for the biodiversity sustainability of forest management either account only for trees, or are indirect biodiversity proxies, often not tested or vaguely defined. This crucial gap stems from the lack of broad scale forest biodiversity data, with multi-taxon biodiversity usually not sampled during national forest inventories due to money and time constraints. Recently, several groups of scientists from research institutions across Europe took up the challenge of multitaxon field sampling through local or regional projects aimed at understanding the effects of forest management on overall ecosystem biodiversity. The COST Action BOTTOMS-UP collects multi-taxon data to build a comprehensive platform of European forest biodiversity. Up to now, we standardized and merged 35 different datasets encompassing 3, 858 plots across 13 forest categories [2] and 13 European countries. For each plot, information on at least three taxonomic groups are available, besides spatial coordinates, individual tree measures, and information on forest …