Dominik Hessenmöller

TL;DR: The results demonstrate that old-growth forests can continue to accumulate carbon, contrary to the long-standing view that they are carbon neutral, and suggest that 15 per cent of the global forest area, which is currently not considered when offsetting increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, provides at least 10 per cent the global net ecosystem productivity.

TL;DR: The Biodiversity Exploratories (www.biodiversityexploratories.de ) as mentioned in this paper is a large-scale and long-term project for functional biodiversity, which includes a hierarchical set of standardized field plots in three different regions of Germany covering manifold management types and intensities in grasslands and forests.

TL;DR: It is concluded that enzyme activity and organismic diversity are the main drivers of wood decay rate, which greatly differed among tree species, and maintaining high tree species diversity will result in high structural deadwood diversity in terms of decay rate and decay stage.

TL;DR: Overall, these findings show that disturbances by management generally increase plant species richness, which suggests that total plantspecies richness is not suited as an indicator for the conservation status of forests, but rather indicates disturbances.

TL;DR: To protect important forest beetle communities and thus the ecosystem functions and services provided by them, it is suggested to shelter remaining ancient forests and to develop near-to-nature management strategies by prolonging rotation periods and increasing structural diversity of managed forests.