Emilie Andrieu

How to maintain domesticity of usages in small rural forests? Lessons from forest management continuity through a french case study

The management of small private forests in the Western World has been under threat owing to rural and agricultural transformations since the Second World War. The actions put in place to preserve those forests are hard to implement because the forests are managed essentially in an unofficial way that is not clearly understood. Through multidisciplinary approaches, our aims were to understand local forest management processes, to assess the continuities and discontinuities of usages and practices in the Coteaux de Gascogne area of France, and to propose guidelines for future forest management. Forest management is shaped by a traditional but unrecognized social system called the house-centered system, which has contributed to a high degree of domesticity and diversity in forestry practices in this area. If forest management guidelines are to be effective, any guidelines put in place should take into account the roots of the traditional management system and attempt to comply with local social organizations. This is a major challenge regarding the long-term preservation of small private forests.

Ecosystem Services from Small Forest Patches in Agricultural Landscapes

In Europe, like in many temperate lowlands worldwide, forest has a long history of fragmentation and land use change. In many places, forest landscapes consist of patches of different quality, age, size and isolation, embedded in a more or less intensively managed agricultural matrix. As potential biodiversity islets, small forest patches (SFP) may deliver several crucial ecosystem services to human society, but they receive little attention compared to large, relatively intact forest patches. Beyond their role as a biodiversity reservoir, SFP provide important in situ services such as timber and wild food (game, edible plants and mushrooms) production. At the landscape scale, SFP may enhance the crop production via physical (obstacle against wind and floods) and biological (sources of pollinators and natural enemies) regulation, but may, on the other hand, also be involved in the spread of infectious diseases. Depending on their geographic location, SFP can also greatly influence the water cycle and contribute to supply high-quality water to agriculture and people. Globally, SFP are important carbon sinks and are involved in nutrient cycles, thus play a role in climate change mitigation. Cultural services are more related to landscape values than to SFP per se, but the latter may contribute to the construction of community identity. We conclude that SFP, as local biodiversity hotspots in degraded landscapes, have the potential to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services and may even be crucial for the ecological intensification of agro-ecosystems. There is thus an urgent need to increase our knowledge about the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services delivered by these SFP in agricultural landscapes.

Agroforestry landscapes and global change: landscape ecology tools for management and conservation

Forest ecosystems are impacted by multiple uses under the influence of global drivers, and where landscape ecology tools may substantially facilitate the management and conservation of the agroforestry ecosystems. The use of landscape ecology tools was described in the eight papers of the present special issue, including changes in forested landscapes due to agricultural and forestry activities, landscape changes due to recent intensification of agriculture, and the impacts of agroforestry as compared to natural forest ecosystems. Landscape ecology can improve the economic, environmental and social values of agroforestry, and this knowledge should help to develop new management alternatives for agroforestry. We believe that these papers will inform management at the landscape level, especially in agroforestry landscapes, offering new tools for management and conservation.

Misconceptions of Fragmentation's Effects on Ecosystem Services: A Response to Mitchell et al.

In a recent opinion article, Mitchell et al. [1] propose to reframe fragmentations effects on ecosystem services (ESs) by explicitly considering the effect of fragmentation not only on ES supply but also on ES flow. This new conceptual framework obviously represents a valuable first step towards a more robust theory linking landscape structure with ESs. However, we are concerned by three problems included in this framework on the effect of habitat fragmentation on ESs. We believe they undermine the framework currently proposed by Mitchell et al.

Effet de l’exposition sur la richesse et la composition floristique des lisières forestières dans le Gâtinais oriental (Loiret)

Les lisières forestières marquent la limite de la forêt, le terme de forêt désignant par convention une association d’arbres formés de troncs et de houppiers d’une hauteur d’au moins 5 m constituant une unité physionomique (Otto, 1998). Elles forment une zone de transition entre l’environnement relativement stable de la forêt et les larges fluctuations microclimatiques du milieu ouvert adjacent (Chen et al., 1995) qui, dans les paysages ruraux, est souvent anthropisé (cultures, prairies...). Ainsi, les conditions environnementales (température, humidité de l’air et du sol) mais aussi la structure et la composition de la végétation sont modifiées dans l’environnement proche des lisières. Ces modifications sont appelées « effet de lisière » (Murcia, 1995 ; Ries et al., 2004). Des études montrent que ces modifications s’observent en général jusqu’à 20 m de part et d’autre de la lisière (Cadenasso et al., 1997) mais peuvent atteindre parfois plusieurs centaines de mètres à l’intérieur de la forêt (Chen et al., 1995 ; Ries et al. 2004 ; Pellissier et al., 2013).