Faculty Opinions recommendation of Big-sized trees overrule remaining trees' attributes and species richness as determinants of aboveground biomass in tropical forests.

Author(s):  
Bernhard Schmid
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A Martin ◽  
Adrian Newton ◽  
Marion Pfeifer ◽  
MinSheng Khoo ◽  
James Bullock

Background. At least a fifth of tropical forests have been logged in the recent past. This practice is an important source of timber but there are concerns about its long-sustainability and impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage. However, there is wide variation in the impacts of logging, making generalisation, and thus policy implementation, difficult. Recent syntheses of animal biodiversity have indicated that differences in logging intensity – the volume of wood removed per hectare – may help explain some of these differences. In addition there have been suggestions that reduced impact logging (RIL) may reduce some of the negative effects of logging. Methods. We aimed to test these hypotheses using meta-analyses to explore differences in the impacts of logging on (1) residual tree damage, (2) aboveground biomass and (3) tree species richness. To do this we used a mixture of unweighted mixed models and weighted meta-regression Results. Our results indicate that RIL may reduce residual tree damage when compared to conventional methods, but that at higher logging intensities this effect is negated. Changes in aboveground biomass were negatively related to logging intensity, but any effect of RIL was obscured by it being carried out at relatively low intensities. Tree richness appeared to initially increase at low intensities but was reduced at higher intensities. Discussion. Our results give only weak support to the hypothesis that RIL reduces the negative impacts of logging on tree damage, and do not support suggestions that RIL reduces loss of biomass or species richness. However, we do not think this is because there is no difference between the impacts of RIL and conventional logging but rather that better evidence is needed to assess these differences. We suggest that studies that take account of plot-level differences in logging intensity are likely to provide a solution to this knowledge gap.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (8) ◽  
pp. 2810-2824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arshad Ali ◽  
Si‐Liang Lin ◽  
Jie‐Kun He ◽  
Fan‐Mao Kong ◽  
Jie‐Hua Yu ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A Martin ◽  
Adrian Newton ◽  
Marion Pfeifer ◽  
MinSheng Khoo ◽  
James Bullock

Background. At least a fifth of tropical forests have been logged in the recent past. This practice is an important source of timber but there are concerns about its long-sustainability and impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage. However, there is wide variation in the impacts of logging, making generalisation, and thus policy implementation, difficult. Recent syntheses of animal biodiversity have indicated that differences in logging intensity – the volume of wood removed per hectare – may help explain some of these differences. In addition there have been suggestions that reduced impact logging (RIL) may reduce some of the negative effects of logging. Methods. We aimed to test these hypotheses using meta-analyses to explore differences in the impacts of logging on (1) residual tree damage, (2) aboveground biomass and (3) tree species richness. To do this we used a mixture of unweighted mixed models and weighted meta-regression Results. Our results indicate that RIL may reduce residual tree damage when compared to conventional methods, but that at higher logging intensities this effect is negated. Changes in aboveground biomass were negatively related to logging intensity, but any effect of RIL was obscured by it being carried out at relatively low intensities. Tree richness appeared to initially increase at low intensities but was reduced at higher intensities. Discussion. Our results give only weak support to the hypothesis that RIL reduces the negative impacts of logging on tree damage, and do not support suggestions that RIL reduces loss of biomass or species richness. However, we do not think this is because there is no difference between the impacts of RIL and conventional logging but rather that better evidence is needed to assess these differences. We suggest that studies that take account of plot-level differences in logging intensity are likely to provide a solution to this knowledge gap.


Author(s):  
Nidhi Jha ◽  
Nitin Kumar Tripathi ◽  
Nicolas Barbier ◽  
Salvatore G. P. Virdis ◽  
Wirong Chanthorn ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Macielle Macedo Coelho ◽  
André Márcio Amorim

The aim of this study is to survey the angiosperms of two montane forest remnants in the southern Bahia, Brazil: Corcovado (SCO) and Pedra Lascada (SPL). Both fragments are located in the municipality of Almadina and Barro Preto, respectively, and are 18 km distant from each other. We sampled 899 species of angiosperms distributed in 437 genera and 116 families. The SCO was the richest area with 678 species, distributed in 367 genera and 100 families. SPL showed 466 species in 269 genera and 88 families. The percentage of species identified was 85.8% and of this total, 37.7% are endemic to the Atlantic Forest, 11.2% are endemic to southern Bahia and northern Espírito Santo and 7% are disjunct between the Atlantic Forest and Amazon. The remaining percentages (44.3%) were of species widely distributed. The richest families in the two areas were Orchidaceae (10%), Rubiaceae (7%), Bromeliaceae (5.5%), Melastomataceae (4.2%) and Poaceae (4%). The richest genera were Psychotria (2%),Piper (1.8%), Ocotea (1.6%),Vriesea (1.5%) and Peperomia (1.4%). More than half of the recorded species showed non-arboreal habit, regarding life forms documented. That comes against the assertion that many authors in the tropical forests, where species richness in angiosperms is expected for non-woody species, especially in montane forests. Twelve species have been identified as new, but seven others already described from collections previously obtained in these two areas. Orchidaceae, Rubiaceae, Poaceae and Bromeliaceae showed significant richness in this study these families are commonly reported as the richest in other inventories in the Atlantic Forest in southern Bahia reinforcing their importance to the regional flora. The high levels of richness, endemism, and the growing numbers of new taxonomic discoveries from the SPL and SCO sites indicate the biological importance of these two forest remnants. The implementation of parks or other protected environmental reserves would be essential to the conservation of its species.


1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 697-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Delaney ◽  
S. Brown ◽  
A. E. Lugo ◽  
A. Torres-Lezama ◽  
N. Bello Quintero

ABSTRACTOne of the major uncertainties concerning the role of tropical forests in the global carbon cycle is the lack of adequate data on the carbon content of all their components. The goal of this study was to contribute to filling this data gap by estimating the quantity of carbon in the biomass, soil and necromass for 23 long-term permanent forest plots in five life zones of Venezuela to determine how C was partitioned among these components across a range of environments. Aboveground biomass C ranged from 70 to 179 Mg ha−1 and soil C from 125 to 257 Mg ha−1, and they represented the two largest C components in all plots. The C in fine litter (2.4 to 5.2 Mg ha−1), dead wood (2.4 to 21.2 Mg ha−1) and roots (23.6 to 38.0 Mg ha−1) accounted for less than 13% of the total C. The total amount of C among life zones ranged from 302 to 488 Mg ha−1, and showed no clear trend with life zone. In three of the five life zones, more C was found in the dead (soil, litter, dead wood) than in the live (biomass) components (dead to live ratios of 1.3 to 2.3); the lowland moist and moist transition to dry life zones had dead to live ratios of less than one. Results from this research suggest that for most life zones, an amount equivalent to between 20 and 58% of the aboveground biomass is located in necromass and roots. These percentages coupled with reliable estimates of aboveground biomass from forest inventories enable a more complete estimation of the C content of tropical forests to be made.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 2341-2350 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Song ◽  
X. Bao ◽  
X. Liu ◽  
Y. Zhang ◽  
P. Christie ◽  
...  

Abstract. Chinese grasslands are extensive natural ecosystems that comprise 40 % of the total land area of the country and are sensitive to N deposition. A field experiment with six N rates (0, 30, 60, 120, 240, and 480 kg N ha−1 yr−1) was conducted at Duolun, Inner Mongolia, during 2005 and 2010 to identify some effects of N addition on a temperate steppe ecosystem. The dominant plant species in the plots were divided into two categories, grasses and forbs, on the basis of species life forms. Enhanced N deposition, even as little as 30 kg N ha−1 yr−1 above ambient N deposition (16 kg N ha−1 yr−1), led to a decline in species richness. The cover of grasses increased with N addition rate but their species richness showed a weak change across N treatments. Both species richness and cover of forbs declined strongly with increasing N deposition as shown by linear regression analysis (p < 0.05). Increasing N deposition elevated aboveground production of grasses but lowered aboveground biomass of forbs. Plant N concentration, plant δ15N and soil mineral N increased with N addition, showing positive relationships between plant δ15N and N concentration, soil mineral N and/or applied N rate. The cessation of N application in the 480 kg N ha−1 yr−1 treatment in 2009 and 2010 led to a slight recovery of the forb species richness relative to total cover and aboveground biomass, coinciding with reduced plant N concentration and soil mineral N. The results show N deposition-induced changes in soil N transformations and plant N assimilation that are closely related to changes in species composition and biomass accumulation in this temperate steppe ecosystem.


Tropics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Yoshiyuki Kiyono ◽  
Eriko Ito ◽  
Yukako Monda ◽  
Jumpei Toriyama ◽  
Thy Sum

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bao Huy ◽  
Giang Thanh ◽  
Krishna Poudel ◽  
Hailemariam Temesgen

Bamboo forests play an important role in achieving the objectives of the United Nations program on Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. We developed and validated a modeling system that simultaneously estimate aboveground biomass and its components for a common bamboo species (Bambusa procera A. Chev. and A. Camus) in tropical forests. Eighty-three bamboo culms were destructively sampled from seventeen 100 m2 sample plots located in different parts of the Central Highlands in Viet Nam to obtain total plant aboveground biomass (AGB) and its components. We examined the performance of weighted nonlinear models fit by maximum likelihood and weighted nonlinear seemingly unrelated regression fit by generalized least squares for predicting bamboo biomass. The simultaneous estimation of AGB and its components produced higher reliability than the models of components and total developed separately. With a large number of bamboo species, it may not be feasible to develop species- specific biomass models, hence genus-specific allometric models may be considered.


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