Biodiversity is the variety of life. Unfortunately, it’s rapidly declining in ecosystems around the world, endangering services crucial to socio-economic development and poverty reduction.

Amidst increased global efforts on conserving biodiversity, successful integration of biological conservation in natural resource management, especially in forestry, remains rare and practical guidelines are lacking.

In an effort to help inform biodiversity conservation plans, an international team of scholars investigated the effects of productivity on biodiversity – in terms of tree species richness – in forest ecosystems across North America and China.

The team was led by Jingjing Liang, assistant professor of forest ecology in the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, and Xiangdong Lei, professor of forest management at the Chinese Academy of Forestry.

The results of their research were published online today (Dec. 22) in Conservation Biology.

The scientists gathered data from 19 types of forest ecosystems, covering nearly three million square kilometers, and discovered that different forest ecosystems from the two countries conformed to a consistent hump-shaped unimodal relationship, suggesting that biodiversity peaks at intermediate productivity, and both low- and high-levels of productivity feature lower biodiversity.

“The consistent productivity–biodiversity relationship we discovered makes it possible to quantify the expected tree species richness that a forest stand is capable of sustaining, and a comparison between the actual species richness and the sustainable values can be useful in prioritizing conservation efforts,” Liang explained.

Species richness is simply the number of species present in a sample community and is only one component of species diversity.

“To local landowners, government, and conservation agencies, for example, when actual biodiversity in a stand is substantially lower than the expected values, such stands would have good potential for sustaining a higher level of biodiversity and conservation efforts may be more effective,” Lei informed, “in contrast, when the actual species richness exceeds or approaches the expected values, it would be more difficult to further increase biodiversity.”

Liang and Lei were joined by Mo Zhou, assistant professor of forest economics, and James V. Watson, a forestry doctoral student.

-WVU-

law/12/22/15

CONTACT: Lindsay Willey, Public Relations Specialist
304.293.2381, Lindsay.Willey@mail.wvu.edu

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