Comparing forests across climates and biomes: Qualitative assessments, reference forests and regional intercomparisons

10923 6 54739 2 153862 document 54739 Comparing forests across climates and biomes.PDF application/pdf 507d715cc1732d369310698de339150b MD5 395946 2016-05-09 13:47:04 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/10923/1/Comparing%20forests%20across%20climates%20and%20biomes.PDF 10923 1 1 application/pdf text en public cc_by

Comparing forests across climates and biomes.PDF

published 54740 2 153865 document 54740 lightbox.jpg image/png 91eb7248586128ed781ab51f00feab8a MD5 65139 2016-05-09 13:47:28 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/10923/2/lightbox.jpg 10923 2 2 image/png other Thumbnails conversion from text to thumbnail_lightbox en public

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http://eprints.org/relation/isVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/54739 http://eprints.org/relation/isVolatileVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/54739 http://eprints.org/relation/issmallThumbnailVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/54739 archive 351 disk0/00/01/09/23 2016-01-15 08:50:44 2021-08-27 17:39:40 2016-01-15 08:50:44 article show Salk C.F. 8556 Frey U. Rusch H. Comparing forests across climates and biomes: Qualitative assessments, reference forests and regional intercomparisons pub iis_env prog_esm prog_pds Communities, policy actors and conservationists benefit from understanding what institutions and land management regimes promote ecosystem services like carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. However, the definition of success depends on local conditions. Forests' potential carbon stock, biodiversity and rate of recovery following disturbance are known to vary with a broad suite of factors including temperature, precipitation, seasonality, species' traits and land use history. Methods like tracking over-time changes within forests, or comparison with "pristine" reference forests have been proposed as means to compare the structure and biodiversity of forests in the face of underlying differences. However, data from previous visits or reference forests may be unavailable or costly to obtain. Here, we introduce a new metric of locally weighted forest intercomparison to mitigate the above shortcomings. This method is applied to an international database of nearly 300 community forests and compared with previously published techniques. It is particularly suited to large databases where forests may be compared among one another. Further, it avoids problematic comparisons with old-growth forests which may not resemble the goal of forest management. In most cases, the different methods produce broadly congruent results, suggesting that researchers have the flexibility to compare forest conditions using whatever type of data is available. Forest structure and biodiversity are shown to be independently measurable axes of forest condition, although users' and foresters' estimations of seemingly unrelated attributes are highly correlated, perhaps reflecting an underlying sentiment about forest condition. These findings contribute new tools for large-scale analysis of ecosystem condition and natural resource policy assessment. Although applied here to forestry, these techniques have broader applications to classification and evaluation problems using crowdsourced or repurposed data for which baselines or eternal validations are not available. 2014-04 published Public Library of Science (PLoS) 10.1371/journal.pone.0094800 XJ-14-127 PLoS ONE; 9(4):e94800 (April 2014) [doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094800] 262 public PLoS ONE 9 4 e94800 TRUE 1932-6203 FALSE info:eu-repo/semantics/article