Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT
Volume 188, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10661-016-5489-7
Keywords
Indicators; Verifiers; Genetic diversity; Management; Forest genetic resources; FGM
Categories
Funding
- European Union's LIFE financial mechanism (LIFEGENMON project) [LIFE13 ENV/SI/000148]
- Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning
- Ministry for Agriculture, Forestry and Food of the Republic of Slovenia
- Bavarian Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forestry
- EUFORINNO project (RegPot) [315982]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Safeguarding sustainability of forest ecosystems with their habitat variability and all their functions is of highest priority. Therefore, the long-term adaptability of forest ecosystems to a changing environment must be secured, e.g., through sustainable forest management. High adaptability is based on biological variation starting at the genetic level. Thus, the ultimate goal of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to halt the ongoing erosion of biological variation is of utmost importance for forest ecosystem functioning and sustainability. Monitoring of biological diversity over time is needed to detect changes that threaten these biological resources. Genetic variation, as an integral part of biological diversity, needs special attention, and its monitoring can ensure its effective conservation. We compare forest genetic monitoring to other biodiversity monitoring concepts. Forest genetic monitoring (FGM) enables early detection of potentially harmful changes of forest adaptability before these appear at higher biodiversity levels (e.g., species or ecosystem diversity) and can improve the sustainability of applied forest management practices and direct further research. Theoretical genetic monitoring concepts developed up to now need to be evaluated before being implemented on a national and international scale. This article provides an overview of FGM concepts and definitions, discusses their advantages and disadvantages, and provides a flow chart of the steps needed for the optimization and implementation of FGM. FGM is an important module of biodiversity monitoring, and we define an effective FGM scheme as consisting of an assessment of a forest population's capacity to survive, reproduce, and persist under rapid environmental changes on a long-term scale.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available