Plantation forests cannot support the richness of forest specialist plants in the forest-steppe zone

• Published in: Forest ecology and management 2020-04, Vol.461, p.117964, Article 117964
• Main Authors: Rédei, Tamás, Csecserits, Anikó, Lhotsky, Barbara, Barabás, Sándor, Kröel-Dulay, György, Ónodi, Gábor, Botta-Dukát, Zoltán
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alien species; Black locust; Forest management; Land use history; Mechanical site preparation; Pedunculate oak
• ISSN: 0378-1127; 1872-7042
• DOI: 10.1016/j.foreco.2020.117964

•In plantation forests of forest-steppe species richness of forest specialist herbs is very low.•Site preparationdecreases stronger their richness than planting alien trees.•With site preparation alien plants appear and establish permanently in plantations.•Continuity of natural oak forests is the key to preserve richness of specialists. In forestry, several types of management practices are used, which have significant effects on species richness and composition. A number of studies concerning the effect of management on biodiversity have been conducted in the tropical and temperate forest zones. This topic is less studied in the forest steppe biome, where the reestablishment of plants from the surrounding patches is more limited than in the forest biome. Most studies compare alien plantations with seminatural forests. However, the effects of dominant tree species is mixed with the effect of the site preparation and site history in such comparisons, due to intensive site preparation in case of forest plantations. In this study, we separate the effect of these management elements. We examined the potential of currently used forestry protocol in preserving the plant biodiversity of the forest herb layer in the Pannonian sand forest steppe using 266 forest plots from the Kiskunság sand region in Hungary. The total richness and richness of habitat preference groups (forest specialists, grassland specialists, native weeds, and aliens) were compared in natural and plantation forests of different tree species to explore the effects of dominant tree species and site preparation on the species composition. Factors determining the richness of forest specialists in plantations were analyzed by fitting a regression tree, and the habitat preference of these species was described by their fidelity to the forest types. Our results show that total species richness is less sensitive to management than the richness of some species groups with a specific habitat preference. Forest specialist species can survive almost only in continuous seminatural oak forests, that is, in forests that are continuously present and do not undergo any site preparation. They are completely missing from young plantations, most likely because site preparation completely removes them. Their limited recolonization is possible only in plantations of native trees in landscapes where seminatural oak forests have been continuously present. Even under these conditions, only half of the forest specialis