Tree to tree interactions are important structuring mechanisms for forest community dynamics. Forest management takes advantage especially of competition effects on tree growth by removing or retaining trees to achieve management goals. Both competition and silviculture have, thus, a strong effect on density and distribution of tree related microhabitats which are often key structures for forest taxa at the tree and stand scale. In particular, spatially-explicit data to understand patterns and mechanisms of tree-related microhabitats formation in forest stands are rare. To train and eventually improve decision-making capacities related to the integration of biodiversity aspects into forest management plots of one hectare size, so called marteloscopes, are used as forest training or outdoors learning classrooms. In each plot, a set of data is collected at the individual tree level and stored in a database, the ‘I+ repository’. The repository’ is a centralised online database which serves for maintaining the data of all marteloscope plots part of the Integrate demonstration site network. A subset of this repository was made publicly available via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, based on a data-sharing policy. The repository is now also published as a data paper in the Biodiversity Data Journal and openly accessible.
Zudin S, Heintz W, Kraus D, Krumm F, Larrieu L, Schuck A (2022) A spatially explicit database of tree-related microhabitats in Europe and beyond. Biodiversity Data Journal 10: e91385. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.10.e91385