Red-listed wood-inhabiting fungi in natural and managed forest landscapes adjacent to the timberline in central Sweden

Abstract

Many wood-inhabiting fungi are today threatened as modern forestry practices drastically reduce the amount of dead wood available in various forest ecosystems. We investigated whether the occurrence of red-listed wood-inhabiting fungi differed between natural and managed forest landscapes adjacent to the timberline in the middle part of Sweden. We assessed whether environmental variables such as the degree of human impact, length of forest roads, dead wood volume and quality affected species richness and abundance. The effects of forestry on wood-inhabiting fungi have been assessed in several studies in lowland Swedish forests. Few studies have, however, been conducted in forest landscapes adjacent to the timberline in Sweden. This is potentially important since forests close to the Swedish mountains have been pointed out as one of few intact forest landscapes in Fennoscandia and they are subjected to increasing logging pressure. Similar to other studies, species numbers and abundances were positively correlated with larger volumes of logs in various decay stages. However, never shown previously, the length of forest roads was negatively correlated with species abundance and occurrence of red-listed species. We suggest that a low amount of forest roads can be used as a conservation indicator to localize still-intact forest landscapes.

Keywords:

• forest conservation
• indicator species
• boreal forest landscapes
• coarse woody debris
• human impact
• road-free areas

Acknowledgements

We thank Carl-Johan Wikström, the County Administrative Board of Jämtland, for GIS help in the forest selection process, Tim Hipkiss for kindly improving the English and Lars Ericson and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.