Relationships between forest ecosystem services – current state of knowledge

Autorzy

• Mariusz Ciesielski Department of Geomatics, Forest Research Institute, Sękocin Stary, Braci Leśnej 3, 05-090 Raszyn, Poland,
  e-mail: m.ciesielski@ibles.waw.pl
  a – https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-1215-140X
• Piotr Gołos Forest Research Institute, Department of Forest Management
  Braci Leśnej 3, Sękocin Stary, 05-090 Raszyn, Poland
  https://orcid.org/ 0000-0001-5303-136X
• Emilia Wysocka-Fijorek Department of Geomatics, Forest Research Institute, Sękocin Stary
  Braci Leśnej 3, 05-090 Raszyn, Poland
  https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-4838-8169
• Adam Kaliszewski Forest Research Institute, Department of Forest Resources Management, Sękocin Stary,
  Braci Leśnej 3, 05-090 Raszyn, Poland
  https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-4737-3176

Abstract

Forests provide many different ecosystem services (ESs) to society. We divide these services into three main groups: provisioning, regulating and cultural. The services themselves are usually interrelated, so changes in the level of one of these services can affect the others. Depending on the nature of the mutual relationship, a distinction is made between trade-off and synergy. Understanding the relationships between services in a given area, time period and scale can support conscious management of forest resources, taking into account the concept of ES. This article aims to systematically review the literature with the aim of identifying the relationships between the services and the factor that influence these relationships. Particular attention was paid to the provisioning service, i.e., timber harvesting, and its relationships with other services, taking into account different variants of forest management. The literature
search was conducted using the SCOPUS database, which was searched for scientific articles published between 2005 and December 2023 containing the following terms: “ecosystem services” AND “forest” AND “bundle” or “ecosystem services” AND “forest” AND “synergy” or “ecosystem services” AND “forest” AND “trade-off”. The query resulted in 825 records, of which 55 articles were subjected to a detailed content analysis using a standardised procedure. The results show that most studies analysed the relationships between timber harvesting and biodiversity, carbon storage/sequestration and water erosion. Cultural Ecosystem Services were only examined in a few studies. In most cases, timber harvesting is at trade-off with cultural and regulating services. Many factors influence the supply of services and the relationship between them: climate change, forest management scenarios, temporal and spatial scale of the simulation, species composition and age class or more generally the structure of the forest stand, the history of the study area, its location, habitat productivity and geomorphology. The results show that further work
is needed in the area of ES in order to apply this concept in forest management.

Keywords

• trade-off
• synergy
• wood production
• CICES
• carbon
• biodiversity
• recreation