Are ungulates in forests concerns or key species for conservation and biodiversity? Reply to Boulanger et al. (DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13899)

Increasing species richness of light demanding species in forests may not be a conservation concern if we accept a macroecological and evolutionary baseline for biodiversity. Most of the current biodiversity in Europe has evolved in the Pleistocene or earlier, and in ecosystems markedly influenced by dynamic natural processes, including grazing. Many threatened species are associated with high-light forest environments such as forest glades and edges, as these have strongly declined at least partially due to the decline of large herbivores in European forests. Hence, moderate grazing in forests should be an ecological baseline and conservation target rather than a concern.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Global Change Biology

• Publication date

  2018-03-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/gcb.14029PMID 29271546
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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