When it comes to making decisions about conservation, scientists and policymakers prioritize biodiversity. Diverse environments support more species and provide greater ecosystem services, making them the obvious choice.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the simplest measure of diversity, which involves counting all the species in a given area, is the best way to gauge forest productivity.
Lead author Yunpeng Liu, a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum of Natural History, noted the scarcity of studies comparing diversity measurements. Most existing studies use data from small, isolated forest plots.
Specializing in forest productivity, Liu recognized the potential of the U.S. Forest Service’s extensive tree data and decided to analyze it.
Liu and his colleagues compared three measures of biodiversity and their relationship to forest productivity across the eastern United States. They analyzed nearly two million tree measurements from 23,145 forest plots, collected between 2000 and 2020 from non-plantation forests.
2024-03-26 02:00:03
Original from phys.org