Biodiversität in sozial-ökologischen Systemen: Niederwälder in Deutschland (CopWoods)

Basic data for this project

Description

The biodiversity of open landscapes has been declining strongly over the past decades in Central Europe. Agricultural intensification and farmland abandonment are the most important drivers of this trend. Changes in forest management are now surfacing as an additional cause: a transition from light, open forests to tall, dense stands with a cooler microclimate has resulted in losses of many open-habitat plants and animals during the past decades. Open-country biodiversity in Central Europe often survives in cultural landscapes, managed as socio-ecological systems. With decade-long trends of urbanization, rural outmigration and a loss of traditional knowledge, important components of such systems have been lost. However, landscapes still exist where traditional land management results in large biodiversity benefits. One such area are traditionally managed coppiced woods. In Northern Hesse, in the Lahn-Dill-area, a contiguous landscape of 1,800 ha oak-birch-forest is coppiced by village communities in a very traditional way, nowadays mostly for firewood. Stands are cut down patchily after 18-20 years, which results in a rich mosaic of forest regrowth of young age classes. Our main objectives in this project are: 1) To quantify the area of managed coppice during the past 200 years using historical mapsTo conduct field surveys to relate the density of birds and butterflies to time since cutting, thereby quantifying community responses to regrowth trajectories. 2) To reconstruct bird population trends for the past 200 years by back-projecting population densities to historic landscapes. 3) Based on the collected data, to develop scenarios of future land use assuming coppice persistence and coppice loss, and assessing trade-offs between biodiversity, economical viability and societal persistence of coppice systems.