Authors: Burrascano, Sabina; Chianucci, Francesco;Doerfler, Inken;Kepfer-Rojas, Sebastian;Mitić, Bozena;Munzi, Silvana;Nagel, Thomas Andrew;Ódor, Peter;Paillet, Yoan;Sitzia, Tommaso;

The maintenance of forest biodiversity in Europe strongly relies on the concept of sustainable forest management. Nevertheless, current forest management has an important impact on forest biodiversity and was identified as the main pressure for most European forest habitats.
Current indicators for the sustainability of forest management either account only for trees, or are indirect biodiversity proxies. Broad-scale forest biodiversity data are still lacking in national and continental forest information systems.
Several groups of scientists across Europe took up the challenge of multi-taxon field sampling through local projects on the effects of forest management on overall forest biodiversity. The COST Action “BOTTOMS-UP” collected multi-taxon data to build a comprehensive platform of European forest biodiversity. Up to now, we standardized and merged 36 different datasets encompassing 3,595 sampling units across 13 out of 14 forest categories and 12 European countries. Each sampling unit was surveyed for at least three taxonomic groups and for individual tree measures, and associated with a specific forest management system.
We found that differences in biodiversity sustainability across management systems are scale and taxon dependent. Broad-scale monitoring networks should account for these differences and be tailored on specific conservation objectives.