Towards ecosystem-friendly practices of salvage logging in Mediterranean burnt forests

Session: Fire impacts and lessons learnt

Presenter: Pere Pons (Research Group on Ecological Disturbances and Terrestrial Animal Communities (Pecat), Universitat de Girona)

Contact email: pere.pons@udg.edu

Our work deals with the ecology and conservation of animals after fire, salvage logging and biological invasions. We work at different scales to assess the impacts of disturbances, to analyze invasion risks and to promote best management practices.

Link: http://anifog.wixsite.com/anifog

ABSTRACT: After fire, the timber of the burned forests is usually harvested by clearcutting over large areas to be used mainly as bioenergy. Recent scientific evidence has shown the strong impact that these “salvage logging” practices have on the ecosystem. However, forest owners and companies largely ignore academic debate, and salvage logging decisions are usually taken for economic, practical and emotional reasons. In 2016, with the aim of providing evidence-based guidelines to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services, we published the “Handbook of Good Management Practices in Burnt Mediterranean Forests”.  It contains the scientific fundamentals of post-fire management, a decision-making tool to facilitate management decision-making, as well as recommendations for sustainable forestry. Our current work is devoted to experimentally testing the effects of non-intervention, sustainable and conventional logging on ecosystem and biodiversity indicators in a recently burned forest. Selected indicators will give us information about soil fertility and erosion, woody biomass, plant regeneration, invertebrate and vertebrate diversity, seed removal and the economy of each treatment. We would like to discuss these ideas with the attendants at the Forum.