Biodiversity along temperate forest succession

1. The successional dynamics of forests – from canopy openings to regeneration, maturation and decay – influences the amount and heterogeneity of resources available for forest-dwelling organisms. Conservation has largely focused only on selected stages of forest succession (e.g. late-seral stages). However, to develop comprehensive conservation strategies and to understand the impact of forest management on biodiversity, a quantitative understanding of how different trophic groups vary over the course of succession is needed.
2. We classified mixed mountain forests in Central Europe into nine successional stages using airborne LiDAR. We analysed α- and β-diversity of six trophic groups encompassing approximately 3,000 species from three kingdoms. We quantified the effect of successional stage on the number of species with and without controlling for species abundances and tested whether the data fit the more-individuals hypothesis or the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis. Furthermore, ...