Lines were generated by fitting a loess curve. In individual‐rich communities, more species reach viable population sizes, which increases the observed number of species. T.H., N.F., R.B. analysed and interpreted the data and led the writing of the manuscript with substantial input from all co‐authors. The successional stages differed in both elevation and soil characteristics (Supporting Information Figures S4 and S5; ANOVA: elevation F8,278 = 19.8, p < 0.001; soil F8,278 = 5.06, p < 0.001). Forest succession. Reconciling forest profitability and biodiversity conservation under disturbance risk: the role of forest management and salvage logging. Advanced Texts in Life Sciences. and you may need to create a new Wiley Online Library account. Future analyses could supplement chronosequence data with simulation approaches to more explicitly study long‐term trajectories of forest succession. Learn more. However, to develop comprehensive conservation strategies and to understand the impact of forest management on biodiversity, a quantitative understanding of how different trophic groups vary over the course of succession is needed. Forest succession is simply the succession or the order-ly and predictable change in the dominant species of forest plants. These decision trees incorporate information on canopy projection area, maximum diameter at breast height (DBH), proportion of dead wood, normalized quartile of the DBH, and the cover and height of the regeneration layer (Supporting Information Figure S2). and N.F. Variety of woody debris as the factor influencing wood‐inhabiting fungal richness and assemblages: Is it a question of quantity or quality? This U‐shaped response increases the resource availability for phytophagous insects (Bouget & Duelli, 2004). The number of species was predicted using a generalized linear mixed model with Poisson error and an observation‐level random effect. To quantify the contribution of β‐diversity among plots and among stages of forest succession to the γ‐diversity in our study system, we used additive diversity partitioning as implemented in the r package vegan, version 2.4‐3 (Oksanen et al., 2017). However, when we controlled for the effect of abundances, vascular plants showed a linear response to forest succession, which indicated that in early stages, the increase in the number of species is mainly driven by denser understorey vegetation and thus more individuals, rather than by habitat heterogeneity. concepts and applications Modeling disturbance and succession in forest landscapes using LANDIS: introduction Linking … Overall, this distinction of the 23 lineages into trophic groups yielded 33 functional groups; each of these functional groups were analysed on 29–287 plots (for details, see Supporting Information Appendix S1 and Table S1). α‐diversity can be promoted in the short term by creating and maintaining early stages of succession, and this is an important option for ecosystem management (for experimental evidence, see Sebek et al., 2015). The productivity of mixed mountain forests comprised of Fagus sylvatica, Picea abies, and Abies alba across Europe. Late stages of forest succession, such as the terminal and decay stages, are largely absent, as most forests are harvested before trees reach old age (Faustmann, 1995). Nicolas Friess, Department of Ecology – Animal Ecology, Faculty of Biology, Philipps‐Universität Marburg, Karl‐von‐Frisch Str. We quantified the effect of successional stage on the number of species with and without controlling for species abundances and tested whether the data fit the. At the community level, we calculated multiple‐site dissimilarities for taxonomic groups using the Sørensen dissimilarity index and partitioned the thus derived β‐diversity into its additive turnover and nestedness components as implemented in the betapart r package version 1.4‐1 (Baselga, Orme, Villeger, De Bortoli, & Leprieur, 2017). (H3) species compositions in the early and late successional stages, which are characterized by open canopies, would be similar as many insects respond to the openness of the habitat. Changes in species composition of these taxa along forest succession were illustrated using partial correspondence analyses conditioned on the effects of elevation and soil. Most unique species were found in the early and late stages of forest succession (Supporting Information Figure S7). Multi-decadal surveys in a Mediterranean forest reserve – do succession and isolation drive moth species richness?. Here, forest succession had a positive linear effect on plants and saproxylic beetles, i.e., over the course of forest succession, the number of species increased. Nevertheless, the gap stage and the decay stage in our study differ markedly as the canopy projection area in the gap stage is considerably lower than in the decay stage (Supporting Information Figure S11). Another factor is the diversity of resources (Cramer & Willig, 2005). Late successional stages cannot be produced artificially but have to develop naturally over long time periods (but see Speight, 1989 and Sebek, Altman, Platek, & Cizek, 2013 for techniques inducing premature senescence). This variant of the habitat heterogeneity hypothesispredicts an increase in the number of species independent of abundance (MacArthur & MacArthur, 1961). Black bars indicate the, Normalized sum of predicted number of species along forest succession for the three kingdom animals, plants, and fungi.