Achieving global and regional perspectives on forest biodiversity and conservation

Forests are arguably the single most important repository of global biodiversity, attracting the attention of conservation planners as well as foresters. Diversity is an essential factor in maintaining forest function, so its conservation and management are important issues in forest planning. Because species and ecosystems are no respecters of national boundaries, and international collaboration is required to ensure their preservation, conservation issues are increasingly being viewed on global and regional, as well as national scales. However, building reliable pictures of biodiversity resources at these scales is a complex task. Direct measures of species diversity over broad areas are neither possible nor meaningful. Instead, the issue may be addressed through indicators of species diversity such as ecosystem diversity, indicators of forest condition, and the identification of major centres of speciation and endemism. Even for these surrogates, problems arise in the process of scaling up from more local data sets because of the different definitions, classifications and data sources used by different agencies and groups of researchers. The broad scale data sets that are available for global and regional scale forest conservation planning include global forest cover, ecoregion distribution, protected areas coverages, endemic and important bird areas, distributions of endangered and threatened species, and information on deforestation and trade in endangered species. Information as yet unavailable which would contribute substantially to broad scale perspectives on conservation of forest systems includes: a) potential forest cover at global and regional scales, b) more complete information on plant and invertebrate species diversity and distribution, and c) measures of the relationships between people and the forest, e.g. use of forest products, and their impacts on forest ecosystems and biodiversity. Improvements in the understanding of issues and processes in global forest biodiversity and its conservation will be derived from global assessment exercises like the Forest Resources Assessment of the FAG, increasing global compatibility of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, forest certification processes, and national reporting exercises, e.g. for the Convention on Biological Diversity.