Overcoming the disconnect between species interaction networks and biodiversity conservation in a forest management context

Decision-makers and managers urgently need strategies to halt biodiversity loss and maintain ecosystem resilience, while meeting socio-economic needs. Although forests provide essential socio-economic services and host important levels of biodiversity, biodiversity conservation practices in forestry remain largely focused on single species or habitat preservation. This likely overlooks the complexity of species interactions that sustain critical forest functions, some of which can feed back into socio-economic values -- e.g., pest-regulation, or lack thereof, can influence timber provisioning. This limits the ability to anticipate cascading effects of species loss, climate change, and altered disturbance regimes.

Species interaction networks offer a powerful tool to address these gaps. Despite their potential and the fact that trophic network data are increasingly available, explicit integration of network-derived indicators into forest management is virtually nonexistent. This is in great part due to challenges of uncertainty, interpretability, and accessibility for practitioners. Yet, we argue that existing data sources—such as regional metawebs, species distribution models, and long-term monitoring programs—combined with established network indicators can provide a sufficient foundation to utilise network information to guide forest management now, at least at broad spatial scales.

In this presentation, we will focus on how we could close this gap. We will outline criteria that indicators derived from interaction networks must meet to be relevant for decision-makers and managers, and will show how an existing network indicator, trophic network robustness, could be used presently to measure a forest system’s capacity to withstand cascading extinctions, using existing data. We will also discuss how existing data and methods can be tied with scenarios of climate and habitat change (the latter influenced by forestry practices) to forecast impacts on forest trophic networks and weigh these against changes in other forest properties, at large spatial scales. Although these solutions are not yet operationalizable at forest operation scales, they can help shift forest management and broad-scale decision-making from species-centric approaches and enhance our ability to meet forest biodiversity conservation goals.