Publicaties

Background: Forest management aims at obtaining a sustainable production of wood to be harvested to generate products or energy. However, the quantitative influence of forest management and of removals by harvest on biomass stocks has rarely been analysed on a large scale based on measurements. Two hypotheses prevail: management induces a reduction of wood stocks due to cuttings, versus no impact because of increased growth of the remaining ...

Changes in land use have been shown to have profound effects on forest plant community structure and diversity. Dispersal limitation has been invoked as a major factor hampering colonization of forest plant species, while seed-sowing experiments and performance observations have provided some evidence for recruitment limitation determining forest plant distribution in post-agricultural forests. However, most of these studies were relatively ...

Recent studies projecting future climate change impacts on forests mainly consider either the effects of climate change on productivity or on disturbances. However, productivity and disturbances are intrinsically linked because 1) disturbances directly affect forest productivity (e.g. via a reduction in leaf area, growing stock or resource-use efficiency), and 2) disturbance susceptibility is often coupled to a certain development phase of the ...

The moist evergreen Afromontane forest of SW Ethiopia has become extremely fragmented and most of the remnants are intensively managed for cultivation of coffee (Coffea arabica), with considerable impacts on forest structure, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We assessed the effect of coffee forest management and forest fragmentation on epiphytic orchid diversity. We selected large and small intensively managed forest sites and compared ...

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd and British Mycological Society Understanding the assembly of biological communities in space and time is a major goal in community ecology. While most studies have focused on community assembly patterns in macro-organisms, there are comparatively few studies on micro-organisms. Here, we investigated how communities of ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi assemble in fragmented forests. We used a space-for-time substitution as an ...

Continuous deterioration of the natural resource base has become a serious threat to both the ecological systems and economic production in Ethiopia. Many of these problems have been attributed directly or indirectly to the rapid dwindling of the country's forest cover which is associated with unsustainable forest use and management. Closing community woodlands from human and livestock intervention to promote natural regeneration of forests has ...