# Editorial: Forests of high naturalness as references for management and conservation: Potential and pitfalls

Maxence Martin, Osvaldo Valeria, Peter Potapov, Yoan Paillet

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

## To cite this version:

Maxence Martin, Osvaldo Valeria, Peter Potapov, Yoan Paillet. Editorial: Forests of high naturalness as references for management and conservation: Potential and pitfalls. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2022, 5, pp.1004087. 10.3389/ffgc.2022.1004087. hal-04048132

HAL Id: hal-04048132

https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04048132

Submitted on 27 Mar 2023

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Check for updates

OPEN ACCESS

EDITED AND REVIEWED BY
Manfred J. Lerer,
University of Natural Resources and
Life Sciences Vienna, Austria

*CORRESPONDENCE
Maxence Martin
maxence.martin2@uqat.ca

SPECIALTY SECTION
This article was submitted to
Forest Management,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Forests and Global Change

RECEIVED 26 July 2022
ACCEPTED 04 August 2022
PUBLISHED 23 August 2022

CITATION
Martin M, Valeria O, Potapov P and
Paillet Y (2022) Editorial: Forests of
high naturalness as references for
management and conservation:
Potential and pitfalls.
Front. For. Glob. Change 5:1004087.
doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2022.1004087

COPYRIGHT
© 2022 Martin, Valeria, Potapov and
Paillet. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License
(CC BY). The use, distribution or
reproduction in other forums is
permitted, provided the original
author(s) and the copyright owner(s)
are credited and that the original
publication in this journal is cited, in
accordance with accepted academic
practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does
not comply with these terms.

Editorial: Forests of high
naturalness as references for
management and conservation:
Potential and pitfalls

Maxence Martin¹,²*, Osvaldo Valeria¹,², Peter Potapov³ and
Yoan Paillet⁴

¹Forest Research Institute, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Rouyn-Noranda, QC, Canada, ²NSERC-UQAT-UQAM Industrial Chair in Sustainable Forest Management, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Rouyn-Noranda, QC, Canada, ³Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States, ⁴INRAE, LESSEM, Université de Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

KEYWORDS

primary forest, old-growth forest, natural forest, forest management and conservation, climate change, biodiversity crisis, primeval forest, intact forest landscapes

Editorial on the Research Topic

Forests of high naturalness as references for management and conservation: Potential and pitfalls

Forest ecosystems are critical to address the collapse of biodiversity and climate
change crisis faced by our societies. The many habitats and ecosystem services they
provide, such as carbon sequestration or water cycle regulation, need to be protected.
In this context, forests of high naturalness have an exceptional importance because
of the higher amount and quality of ecosystem services they provide compared to
managed forests (Watson et al., 2018). “Naturalness” describes a gradient of human
impact on nature, with naturalness increasing as human impact decreases (Winter,
2012). This concept is however rooted in the Western paradigm of “nature/culture”
distinction (Ducarme et al., 2021). In this Research Topic, Clement et al. emphasize
that high naturalness does not mean an absence of humans and interactions with their
environment. The authors focus on the Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, who have been
using and changing the Amazonian forest for millennia, a forest that is at the same
time recognized for its high naturalness value (Potapov et al., 2008; Venter et al., 2016).
Acknowledging that the loss of naturalness is mainly due to modern industrial activities,
and not to human presence *per se*, is essential for considering the various issues explored
in this Research Topic. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations has recently recognized that a forest showing evidences of traditional
indigenous activities can still be considered a primary forest (FAO, 2020).

Reducing or even halting the degradation of forests of high naturalness is
a critical issue, as modern human activities continue to cause their loss around
the world (Potapov et al., 2017), aggravating climate change and biodiversity loss
crises. Tropical and boreal forests contain the largest remaining area of forests
of high naturalness compared to other biomes, but are subject to a high level of threat. In this Research Topic, Grantham et al. show that about 20% of intact tropical forest landscapes are located in the areas of extractive concessions, implying significant short- and medium-term threats to these forests. Large-scale deforestation is a major issue that has affected tropical forests of high naturalness, causing major losses of habitat as well as carbon stored in these forests. The results of Grantham et al. highlight that the granting of extractive concessions will continue to maintain this degradation dynamic. The identification of “no go” areas and the application of effective mitigation strategies is therefore urgent to reduce the pressure of human activities on these forests.

The extension of forest management practices over increasingly large areas and the application of silvicultural treatments aimed at increasing the yield of wood products from forests have a major impact on the habitats and ecosystem services (Puettmann et al., 2009; Kuuluvainen and Gauthier, 2018). Boreal forests are an excellent example of these issues: their low productivity makes clearcutting the preferred silvicultural treatment, even in areas where stand-replacing disturbances such as wildfire are rare and old-growth forests are abundant (Östlund et al., 1997; Boucher et al., 2017; Martin et al., 2021). Extensive agglomeration of clearcutting in boreal areas has resulted in significant forest rejuvenation and fragmentation of old-growth forests (Haeussler and Kneeshaw, 2003). For this reason, alternatives to clearcutting closer to an old-growth dynamics are often presented as a trade-off between timber production and maintenance of the ecosystem services provided by forests of high naturalness (Puettmann et al., 2015). The study of Opoku-Nyame et al. demonstrates the beneficial impacts of partial cutting on bryophyte communities, supporting species associated with old-growth forests and vulnerable to clearcuts. These results confirm previous research demonstrating the ability of partial cuts to maintain habitats related to forests of high naturalness while allowing timber harvesting (Fenton et al., 2013; Franklin et al., 2019).

Developing management strategies that maintain forest attributes and then services provided by forests of high naturalness requires a detailed knowledge of their ecology (Bauhus et al., 2009; Kuuluvainen et al., 2021). In this Research Topic, the study of Pouta et al. improves our knowledge of the spatial structure of trees in old-growth forests of *Picea abies* mixed with *Betula pubescens* in Fennoscandia. The regeneration process of old-growth forests depends not only on competition for light, but also on the spatial distribution of trees at a small stand scale and the availability of microsites. These elements

must therefore be considered to emulate old-growth dynamics through silviculture.

Evaluating the effects of forest management, for example on forest biodiversity, is however complex. Whether in natural or managed forests, knowledge of invertebrate, cryptogam, fungal or bacterial species is disproportionately less than that of vertebrates or vascular flora (Newbold, 2010; Feldman et al., 2020). These differences can be largely explained by the great difficulty of sampling and the high level of expertise required to inventory these under-represented species (Burrascano et al., 2021). Martin et al. propose a synthesis of the potential of tree-related microhabitats (Larrieu et al., 2018), as an indicator of forest attributes harboring a wide diversity of taxa, that can be integrated into routine surveys. Tree-related microhabitats are indeed used by many forest species, in particular those for which little is known, and are often more abundant and diverse in forests of high naturalness. However, it is still a recent concept, little known outside Europe and generally not well integrated in forest inventories. Martin et al. therefore stress the importance of disseminating the use of tree-related microhabitats on a wider scale to make it a common forest inventory tool, contributing to the monitoring of the maintenance of forests of high naturalness attributes in managed forests.

## Author contributions

MM wrote a first draft of the manuscript. OV, PP, and YP reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

## Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

## Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
References

Bauhus, J., Puettmann, K., and Messier, C. (2009). Silviculture for old-growth attributes. *Forest Ecol. Manage.* 258, 525-537. doi: 10.1016/j.foreco.2009.01.053

Boucher, Y., Perrault-Hébert, M., Fournier, R., Drapeau, P., and Auger, I. (2017). Cumulative patterns of logging and fire (1940-2009): consequences on the structure of the eastern Canadian boreal forest. *Landscape Ecol.* 32, 361-375. doi: 10.1007/s10980-016-0448-9

Burrascano, S., Trentanovi, G., Paillet, Y., Heilmann-Clausen, J., Giordani, P., Bagella, S., et al. (2021). Handbook of field sampling for multi-taxon biodiversity studies in European forests. *Ecol. Indic.* 132. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2021.108266

Ducarme, F., Flipo, F., and Couvet, D. (2021). How the diversity of human concepts of nature affects conservation of biodiversity. *Conserv. Biol.* 35, 1019-1028. doi: 10.1111/cobi.13639

FAO (2020). Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020: Terms and Definition FRA. Global Forest Resources Assessment -Terms and Definitions 32.

Feldman, M. J., Imbeau, L., Marchand, P., Mazerolle, M. J., Darveau, M., and Fenton, N. J. (2020). Trends and gaps in the use of citizen science derived data as input for species distribution models: a quantitative review. *PLoS ONE* 16, 1-21. doi: 10.1101/2020.06.01.127415

Fenton, N. J., Imbeau, L., Work, T., Jacobs, J., Bescond, H., Drapeau, P., et al. (2013). Lessons learned from 12 years of ecological research on partial cuts in black spruce forests of northwestern Québec. *Forestry Chronicle* 89, 350-359. doi: 10.5558/tfc2013-065

Franklin, C. M. A., Macdonald, S. E., and Nielsen, S. E. (2019). Can retention harvests help conserve wildlife? Evidence for vertebrates in the boreal forest. *Ecosphere* 10, 1-21. doi: 10.1002/ecs2.2632

Haeussler, S., and Kneeshaw, D. D. (2003). "Comparing forest management to natural processes," in *Towards Sustainable Management of the Boreal Forest*, eds. P. J. Burton, C. Messier, C. Smith, and W. L. Adamowicz (Ottawa: NRC Research Press) 307-368.

Kuuluvainen, T., Angelstam, P., Frelich, L., Jögiste, K., Koivula, M., Kubota, Y., et al. (2021). Natural disturbance-based forest management: moving beyond retention and continuous-cover forestry. *Front Forests Global Change* 4, 1-16. doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2021.629020

Kuuluvainen, T., and Gauthier, S. (2018). Young and old forest in the boreal: critical stages of ecosystem dynamics and management

under global change. *Forest Ecosyst.* 5, 15. doi: 10.1186/s40663-018-0142-2

Larrieu, L., Paillet, Y., Winter, S., Bütler, R., Kraus, D., Krumm, F., et al. (2018). Tree related microhabitats in temperate and Mediterranean European forests: A hierarchical typology for inventory standardization. *Ecol. Indicat.* 84, 194-207. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2017.08.051

Martin, M., Grondin, P., Lambert, M., Bergeron, Y., and Morin, H. (2021). Compared to wildfire, management practices reduced old-growth forest diversity and functionality in primary boreal landscapes of Eastern Canada. *Front. Forests Global Change* 4, 1-16. doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2021.639397

Newbold, T. (2010). Applications and limitations of museum data for conservation and ecology, with particular attention to species distribution models. *Progr. Phys. Geogr.* 34, 3-22. doi: 10.1177/0309133309355630

Östlund, L., Zackrisson, O., and Axelsson, A.-L. (1997). The history and transformation of a Scandinavian boreal forest landscape since the 19th century. *Canad. J. Forest Res.* 27, 1198-1206. doi: 10.1139/x97-070

Potapov, P., Hansen, M. C., Laestadius, L., Turubanova, S., Yaroshenko, A., Thies, C., et al. (2017). The last frontiers of wilderness: Tracking loss of intact forest landscapes from 2000 to 2013. *Sci. Adv.* 3, 1-14. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.160821

Potapov, P., Yaroshenko, A., Turubanova, S., Dubinin, M., Laestadius, L., Thies, C., et al. (2008). Mapping the World's intact forest landscapes by remote sensing. *Ecol. Soc.* 13, 51. doi: 10.5751/ES-02670-130251

Puettmann, K. J., Coates, K. D., and Messier, C. (2009). *A Critique of Silviculture: Managing for Complexity*. Washington D.C.: Island Press. p. 207.

Puettmann, K. J., Wilson, S. M. G., Baker, S. C., Donoso, P. J., Drössler, L., Amente, G., et al. (2015). Silvicultural alternatives to conventional even-aged forest management - What limits global adoption? *Forest Ecosyst.* 2, 1-16. doi: 10.1186/s40663-015-0031-x

Venter, O., Sanderson, E. W., Magrach, A., Allan, J. R., Beher, J., Jones, K. R., et al. (2016). Global terrestrial Human Footprint maps for 1993 and 2009. *Sci. Data* 3, 1-10. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2016.67

Watson, J. E. M., Evans, T., Venter, O., Williams, B., Tulloch, A., Stewart, C., et al. (2018). The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems. *Nat. Ecol. Evolut.* 2, 599-610. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0490-x

Winter, S. (2012). Forest naturalness assessment as a component of biodiversity monitoring and conservation management. *Forestry* 85, 293-304. doi: 10.1093/forestry/cps004