Webinar - Does Biodiversity Recover Following Harvest? Lessons From the Boreal Forest

Boreal forests are regularly subjected to natural disturbances, which affect forest structure, composition, age distribution, biodiversity, and ecosystem function. Forest biodiversity shows continual change over time between disturbance events, eventually “recovering” to a pre-disturbance condition. Understanding whether and how biodiversity recovers following anthropogenic disturbances, such as forest harvesting, is fundamental to land use planning and biodiversity management. Using 183 datasets from 83 different studies from the boreal forest globally we describe the temporal pattern of post-harvest biodiversity recovery for: vascular plants, lichens, bryophytes, birds, small mammals, and different groups of arthropods. The temporal pattern and time period for recovery of species composition varies among biotic groups and forest types (deciduous, mixed, conifer). While recovery often occurred within 30 to 40 years post-harvest there were notable exceptions.