On March 23rd, 2023, 21 students from ETH Zürich had the chance to learn about habitat trees and their microhabitats in a new Integrate+ marteloscope site in Baden (Switzerland). The students performed a tree marking exercise with the aim to identify and retain the ten most ecologically valuable trees while reducing the growing stock by...
The WSL Biodiversity Center and the Blue-Green Biodiversity Research Initiative are pleased to announce their upcoming “Summer school: Blue-green biodiversity. Research and practice and the interface of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems”, to be held in August 2023 in Davos, Switzerland. Freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems are closely interconnected, but they are often studied in isolation from each other. In the context...
New year, new flyer. With the changes that the years have brought to the management of our network, we wanted to update the image we present to the forestry community in Europe and the world. In this new presentation we included the Integrate triangle that associates the three fundamental pillars on which we base our...
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...
For two days, on June 28-29, over 50 marteloscope managers, researchers, and further forestry experts from more than 12 European countries participated in a workshop in Bonn to discuss technical, practical, learning, training, and research issues related to the conservation of microhabitats and biodiversity at marteloscope-monitored sites all over Europe. The first day of the...
In October 2021, Astrid Van Den Bossche, a student from Gent University, established a new marteloscope in Flanders (Belgium), adding it to the extensive Integrate Network. You can read Astrids’ exciting story here
A Tree-related Microhabitat (TreM) is a distinct, well-delineated morphological singularity occurring on living or standing dead trees, which constitutes a crucial substrate for species. Cavities, conks of lignivorous fungi and dead branches are examples of TreMs. TreMs are widely recognized key features of biodiversity and are useful indirect indicators for biodiversity. Therefore, researchers have suggested...
Outbreaks of bark beetles have devastated vast swaths of forests across Europe, flooding media headlines and concerning forest owners, managers, policy-makers, and the public. The outbreaks affected many countries such as Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, or France and challenged not only forest management but entire societies. The unprecedented areas of dead and often...
It sounds like a paradise: Being the largest protected river basin in Europe, the transboundary Mura-Drava-Danube is about to become the first five-country (Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia) biosphere reserve in the world under the auspices of UNESCO. The reserve covers an area of about 8,300 km2, which is comparable to more than one million soccer fields. Being extremely rich in biodiversity, it harbours high ecological and...
Best practice examples from the INTERREG EUROPE project BIOGOV Did you know that when we make plans for our forests, we have to consider the next 50 or even 100 years? You can imagine: Forest management is not an easy thing to do – and decisions taken are often subjects to controversy. To reduce the...
