El uso de inventarios forestales para entender la evolución, el mantenimiento, y el funcionamiento de la diversidad de especies

Résumé

Although national forest inventories (NFIs) appeared with the aim of administrate and manage timber resources, its use has been generalised among ecologists. NFIs have been currently proved as very useful tools to understand forest responses to multiple drivers of global change. However, NFIs also allow answering other more fundamental questions in ecology related to understanding the origin, maintenance, and functioning of species diversity. Thanks to the comprehensive and georeferenced information that NFIs present for local communities along broad environmental gradients, they can serve to foster the emergent field of functional biogeography, which aims to understand the factors, mechanisms, and processes explaining the geographic distribution of species through their functional traits. Equally important, NFIs allow investigating differences in species’ niche through their competitive responses, and which can be the structural, environmental and functional predictors of these niche differences. Finally, NFIs can serve to study the effects of species diversity in the provision of multiple ecosystem services resulting not only from tree species and other trophic levels but also from forest soils. Despite their enormous potential, NFIs are limited in several aspects, which would be desirable to solve in the near future including lack of homogeneity of sampling protocols between countries, limitation in the data accessibility, linkages between soil and tree data, and inclusion of intra-specific variation in functional traits.