Topic 2.1: Conservation of Biological Diversity

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Topic Introduction

Biodiversity is central to sustainable forest management. All the different schemes for criteria and indicators consider it, and under international protocols, biodiversity has its own convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity. This Convention, which dates back to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, deals with the conservation of biological diversity, as might be expected, but also deals with the sustainable use of the components of biodiversity and fair and equitable sharing of any benefits gained from the use of genetic resources. The text of the Convention can be found at: https://www.cbd.int/convention/text/default.shtml Links to an external site..

Maintaining the biological diversity of forests presents many challenges for forest managers. Biological diversity varies over time and space, and during the time that it takes a stand to grow, many different species will come and go. Some species require very specific habitat conditions that may only be present for a short period of time, others require large areas of relatively undisturbed habitat, and yet others specialize in using recently disturbed habitats. For example, pyrophilous beetles are beetles that specialize in utilizing recently burned areas. Examining the biodiversity in a forest at any given point in time provides only a snapshot of a complex and constantly changing ecosystem.

However, as will be shown in this topic, even the prospect of examining biodiversity is fraught with serious problems. There is nowhere on Earth where a complete inventory of all the species present has been conducted, although complete inventories of some taxonomic groups, such as birds, mammals and higher plants have been completed for many part of the world. Several different strategies have been taken to overcome this problem. The most common is to assess habitat (the flora), including both the composition and the structure, rather than the fauna. Plants are much easier to assess than fauna (animals, birds, insects, etc.) as they are static and to an increasing extent can be assessed by remote sensing techniques such as Lidar (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar Links to an external site. for a description of this technique).

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