Biodiversity Lecture

Question 1

Give 3 Ways to measure species diversity.

Answer 1

Alpha: within ecosystem or community

Beta: between ecosystems/communities in a landscape

Gamma: overall diversity within a landscape or region

Question 2

What does the term richness refer to?

Answer 2

Number of species

Question 3

Why is biodiversity considered an important retention element?

Answer 3

• Public/Scientific concern
• Future economic and social opportunities
• Biodiverse forests maintain productivity (resilience, stability, adaptation to change)
• Sustainable Forest Managers Certification
• Shows good forest stewardship

Question 4

Past practices created simpler forests. How does this effect biodiversity?

Answer 4

Certain retention elements like snags, riparian areas and CWD were removed, displacing organisms that depended on them.

Question 5

What are the 5 key principles of maintaining habitat at multiple scales

Answer 5

1. Maintain connectivity
2. Maintain landscape heterogeneity
3. Maintain structural complexity
4. Maintain integrity of aquatic ecosystems
5. Risk spreading: using different strategies at different scales.

Question 6

What is happening to forests that is similar to habitat loss?

Answer 6

Fragmentation of ecosystems

Question 7

Ecosystem based management requires that we emulate natural disturbances when harvesting. What does emulate mean? Why cant we fully mimic natural disturbance?

Answer 7

Emulate: strive to equal or excel

• Since we remove wood from the forest, we can not truly mimic natural disturbance.
• Natural disturbance still continues to take place amidst human activities.

Question 8

What defines a “Wicked Problem”

Answer 8

No single solution
No true or false answer
Very complicated

Question 9

What is implementation monitoring ?

Answer 9

Part 1 of adaptive management. Poses the question, did you do what you said or thought you would do? Contributes little to evaluating effectiveness, yet without knowing for sure what was done, there would be no way to evaluate effectiveness.

Question 10

What is effectiveness monitoring?

Answer 10

Part 2 of adaptive management. Poses the question: Have your actions achieved your ecological objectives?

Question 11

What is the species diversity hierarchy in our region? Largest to smallest.

Answer 11

Terrestrial insects
Marine invertebrates
Vascular plants
Macrofungi
Vertebrates

Question 12

What does variable retention imply?

Answer 12

An approach to harvesting and silviculture signified by:

• Long term retention of trees
• Variable type, amount, spatial pattern
• Shelterwood system is an example

Question 13

What requirements need to be met in order to say a stand is under variable retention?

Answer 13

Forest influence greater than 50%

Trees evenly distributed

Question 14

Does clearcut with reserves require long term retention and distribution?

Answer 14

No, but in practice it usually works out to be that way.

Question 15

What are the biological benefits of VR?

Answer 15

• Maintains variety of stand conditions
• Dispersal of residuals facilitates spread of lichen, moss, mycorrhizae and soil fauna.
• For some birds, 15-20% retention provides suitable habitat for entire block.
• Territorial species require distribution of habitat attributes