Consequences of broadscale timber plantations for biodiversity in cleared rainforest landscapes of tropical and subtropical Australia

By J. Kanowski, Carla P. Catterall, G. Wardell-Johnson. 2005

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Australia, as in many countries, there has been a shift in timber production from native forests to plantations. While plantations are primarily considered an efficient means of producing timber, there is increasing interest in their potential contribution to biodiversity conservation. Plantations may have both positive and negative consequences for biodiversity, at a range of scales. We compiled a list of these consequences from the literature, and used them to assess plantation scenarios proposed for cleared rainforest landscapes in tropical and subtropical Australia. The scenarios were monocultures of: (i) hoop pine, (ii) exotic pine and (iii) eucalypts; (iv) mixed species plantations; (v) a mosaic of monoculture plantations; and (vi) a mosaic of plantations and ecological restoration plantings. Of these scenarios, plantations of eucalypts and exotic pines have the least positive consequences for biodiversity: they have little or no intrinsic value in rainforest landscapes, provide poor quality habitat for rainforest biota, and (particularly eucalypts) are characterised by a relatively open canopy which in cleared landscapes favours the recruitment of grasses and other weeds. The three scenarios based on plantations of rainforest trees have similar, moderately positive consequences for biodiversity, while a mosaic of plantations and restoration plantings has the most positive consequences for biodiversity in cleared rainforest landscapes. All scenarios may have negative impacts on biodiversity conservation if plantations replace remnant forest, provide habitat for weeds, or the tree species used in plantations or their genes escape into native forests. In practice, the relative importance of positive and negative impacts, and hence the ranking of scenarios may vary with landscape forest cover. Scenarios with strongly positive consequences for biodiversity would be favoured for the reforestation of heavily cleared landscapes, whereas scenarios with few negative consequences for biodiversity would be favoured in well-forested landscapes. Consequently, any plantation of rainforest trees may have acceptable consequences for biodiversity in well-forested landscapes, provided the trees are not invasive or carrying exotic genotypes, and plantations are managed to control weeds and feral animals. With the same caveats, plantations of exotic pines may also be acceptable from a biodiversity conservation perspective in well-forested landscapes. At present our capacity to design and manage rainforest plantations for both timber and biodiversity objectives is limited by a lack of information on factors affecting timber production, biodiversity values and trade offs or synergies between these objectives. Obtaining this information will require the integration of large-scale long-term biodiversity research in broadscale plantation projects.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45da468b41e0be0b88193f3dfaa86d9262098311

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Citations in the corpus

The value of primary, secondary and plantation forests for fruit-feeding butterflies in the Brazilian Amazon (2007, unknown): “Kanowski, Catterall & Wardell-Johnson 2005; Gardner et al . 2007).”
Growing Plantation Forests (2010, background): “…plants and animals that live within a region) (Keenan et al. 1997, 1999; Bonham et al. 2002; Hobbs et al. 2003; Lindenmayer et al. 2003; Weih 2004; Kanowski et al. 2005b; Hsu et al. 2010; Jefferies et al. 2010; Oxbrough et al. 2010; Flashpohler and Webster 2011; CalviñoCancela et al. 2012;…”
Bird's Response to Revegetation of Different Structure and Floristics—Are “Restoration Plantings” Restoring Bird Communities? (2011, background): “To date, only one Australian study has compared the bird richness between structurally and floristically diverse plantings in tropical rainforests with agroforestry plantings of one or a few species, and found a greater species richness in the former (Kanowski et al. 2005).”
Factors Affecting the Use of Reforested Sites by Reptiles in Cleared Rainforest Landscapes in Tropical and Subtropical Australia (2006, background): “…birds and invertebrates have been recorded in all types of reforestation surveyed in the present study and are therefore relatively quick to respond to reforestation efforts, rainforest-dependent reptiles in general do not show the same response (Catterall et al. 2004; Kanowski et al. 2005a).”
Can plantations develop understory biological and physical attributes of naturally regenerated forests (2008, background): “…the question has arisen as to what extent plantations that are managed for timber production can also provide some of the basic ecological attributes found in more natural forests, particularly the conservation of biodiversity (Evans, 1999; Kanowski et al., 2005; Stephens and Wagner, 2007).”
Moving ahead with REDD: issues, options and implications (2008, background): “Plantation monocultures are not without biodiversity value, but in general support only a small proportion of the biodiversity of typical natural forest ecosystems (Kanowski et al. 2005).”
Growth, productivity, aboveground biomass, and carbon sequestration of pure and mixed native tree plantations in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica (2006, background): “However, mixed species plantations of rainforest trees are uncommon, largely because they are considered difficult to manage and harvest, and because it is difficult to assemble complementary and stable mixtures to avoid commercial failure (Lamb and Gilmour, 2003; Kanowski et al., 2005).”
Growth in pure and mixed plantations of tree species used in reforesting rural areas of the humid region of Costa Rica, Central America (2006, background): “While oftentimes farmers may prefer to plant tree mixtures for aesthetic reasons or to provide habitat for wildlife, in some cases mixtures can also be more productive than fast-growing monocultures (Lamb and Gilmour, 2003; Kanowski et al., 2005).”
Yield in 8 year-old hybrid poplar plantations on abandoned farmland along climatic and soil fertility gradients (2012, background): “…forests to higher yielding plantations is very common throughout the world (FAO, 2001), with noticeable impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration (Guo and Gifford, 2002; Schroth et al., 2002; Kanowski et al., 2005; Sohngen and Brown, 2006; Danielsen et al., 2009).”
Plant diversity of secondary forests in response to anthropogenic disturbance levels in montane regions of northeastern China (2007, background): “especially the temperate and boreal forests, are already being utilized by human societies (Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002; Zhu and Liu 2004; Kanowski et al. 2005).”