Sammendrag
Large herbivores are often classed as ecosystem engineers, and when they
become scarce or overabundant, this can alter ecosystem states and influence
climate forcing potentials. This realization has spurred a call to integrate large
herbivores in earth system models. However, we lack a good understanding of
their net effects on climate forcing, including carbon and energy exchange. A
possible solution to this lies in harmonizing data across the myriad of large herbivore exclosure experiments around the world. This is challenging due to differences in experimental designs and field protocols. We used airborne laser
scanning (ALS) to describe the effect of herbivore removal across 43 young boreal forest stands in Norway and found that exclusion caused the canopy height
to increase from 1.7 0.2 to 2.5 0.2 m (means SE), and also causing a
marked increase in vertical complexity and above-ground biomass. We then go
on to discuss some of the issues with using ALS; we propose ALS as an
approach for studying the effects of multiple large herbivore exclosure experiments simultaneously, and producing area-based estimates on canopy structure
and forest biomass in a cheap, efficient, standardized and reproducible way. We
suggest that this is a vital next step towards generating biome-wide predictions
for the effects of large herbivores on forest ecosystem structure which can both
inform both local management goals and earth system models
biomass, herbivory, large herbivores, LiDAR,
moose, remote sensing
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