Evaluating the effectiveness of retention forestry to enhance biodiversity in production forests of Central Europe using an interdisciplinary, multi-scale approach.

Retention forestry, which retains a portion of the original stand at the time of harvesting to maintain continuity of structural and compositional diversity, has been originally developed to mitigate the impacts of clear-cutting. Retention of habitat trees and deadwood has since become common practice also in continuous-cover forests of Central Europe. While the use of retention in these forests is plausible, the evidence base for its application is lacking, trade-offs have not been quantified, it is not clear what support it receives from forest owners and other stakeholders and how it is best integrated into forest management practices. The Research Training Group ConFoBi (Conservation of Forest Biodiversity in Multiple-use Landscapes of Central Europe) focusses on the effectiveness of retention forestry, combining ecological studies on forest biodiversity with social and economic studies of biodiversity conservation across multiple spatial scales. The aim of ConFoBi is to assess whether and how structural retention measures are appropriate for the conservation of forest biodiversity in uneven-aged and selectively harvested continuous-cover forests of temperate Europe. The study design is based on a pool of 135 plots (1 ha) distributed along gradients of forest connectivity and structure. The main objectives are (a) to investigate the effects of structural elements and landscape context on multiple taxa, including different trophic and functional groups, to evaluate the effectiveness of retention practices for biodiversity conservation; (b) to analyze how forest biodiversity conservation is perceived and practiced, and what costs and benefits it creates; and (c) to identify how biodiversity conservation can be effectively integrated in multi-functional forest management. ConFoBi will quantify retention levels required across the landscape, as well as the socio-economic prerequisites for their implementation by forest owners and managers. ConFoBi's research results will provide an evidence base for integrating biodiversity conservation into forest management in temperate forests.

Adaptive co-management of conservation conflicts - An interactional experiment in the context of German national parks.

Social-ecological systems are characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and change. Adaptive co-management may help to improve adaptability and resilience and to develop 'no-regret strategies' for a sustainable management. It is a dynamic, inductive, and self-organized process based on social learning and collaboration. In this regard, conservation conflicts, conflicts between humans about wildlife, are a contemporary environmental management issue. Their management may be facilitated through adaptive co-management. However, adaptive co-management typically emerges because of a crisis or changing context and is difficult to be applied intentionally. We hypothesize that it may be possible to lay the ground for an adaptive co-management process by activating stakeholders to interact experimentally without a prescriptive application of adaptive co-management criteria. We examined conservation conflicts in the context of three German national parks, where we triggered interaction between 68 stakeholders in nine moderated focus groups. These were recorded and analyzed. Stakeholders discussed similar conflict issues and conflict management suggestions. Subsequently, we conducted a literature synthesis, resulting in 13 adaptive co-management characteristics, and analyzed concurrencies between these and stakeholders' management suggestions. Management suggestions reflected collaborative, interactional, structural, and practice-oriented adaptive co-management characteristics, while political context, rules, adaptability, learning, and monitoring were underrepresented. These underrepresented adaptive co-management characteristics may be harder to be recognized by stakeholders. An implementation of stakeholder-based management suggestions may prepare the systems for change. However, policy windows and resilience have to be observed, underrepresented characteristics have to be examined, and political context, long-term support, monitoring, and facilitation have to be considered. The approach fosters conservation conflict solution. The results could help protected area managers to further develop a local process. The experiment empowered stakeholders and resulted in case-specific suggestions, backed up by adaptive co-management literature. Research should focus on bridging knowledge between case studies as well as between politics, management, stakeholders, and scientists and on further examining stakeholders' capabilities to develop adaptive co-management approaches.