Exploring the biodiversity of key groups in coppice forests (Central Italy): the relationship among vascular plants, epiphytic lichens, and wood-decaying fungi

Abstract

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) indicators consider the main ecological and socioeconomic functions of forests but do not currently include some key groups widely adopted to assess the effects of forest management, such as herbaceous vascular plants, epiphytic lichens, and wood-decay fungi. Moreover, they are shaped into high forests while in the Mediterranean area the oldest type of forest management is coppice. We investigated the diversity and the relationships of the above-mentioned groups of taxa in three European Forest Types (EFTs) to contribute to the selection of indicator species suitable for monitoring Mediterranean coppice forests. We find only a weak cross-taxon congruence between vascular plants and lichens on considering the whole dataset, while no significant correlations are evident within the three EFTs. Species richness was significantly different among EFTs, being Thermophilous deciduous forests the richest, both considering the groups of taxa separately and the total species richness. As for species composition, significant differences were found both for the whole dataset and also for pairwise comparisons among EFTs. We provided a dwelling-species list of the three key groups of taxa, which could be suitable for monitoring the sustainability characteristics of fragmented and low continuity forests such as coppice stands.

Keywords:

• Cross-taxon congruence
• European forest types
• Fagus sylvatica
• Quercus cerris
• Q. ilex
• forest-dwelling species

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the CREA—Forestry Research Centre for the establishment and maintenance of the experimental trials, and Fabio Padovan and Renato Brotzu for the investigations on wood-decaying fungi. We are also greatly indebted to Andrea Cutini, who coordinated the FutureForCoppiceS project. Further we would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions that helped us to improve this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Luisa Frati: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing—original draft.

Giorgio Brunialti: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing—original draft.

Sara Landi: Data curation, Investigation, Writing—review & editing.

Rossella Filigheddu: Investigation, Writing—review & editing.

Simonetta Bagella: Project administration, Supervision, Conceptualization, Writing—original draft, review & editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Funding

This research is part of a project funded by the LIFE Programme of the European Commission under the Grant Agreement LIFE14 ENV/IT/000514 (LIFE FutureForCoppiceS, “Shaping future forestry for sustainable coppices in Southern Europe: the legacy of past management trials”).