The Impact of Woodland Management Practices on Biodiversity Essay

The Impact of Woodland Management Practices on Biodiversity - Essay Example For humans, woodlands provide a valuable resource in terms of the wood from cutting down trees, and in some cases the use of cleared land for farmland. Both of these uses of woodland significant disrupt the species living within it, often displacing them or causing local extinction. The purpose of this essay is to examining practices of woodland management and to consider what impact these have on biodiversity and what the long-term outcomes of these approaches are likely to be. In addition, alternative approaches to current woodland management practices will be considered, as well as the underlying drivers that influence what woodland management practices are prevalent. It is argued that current woodland management practices place the biodiversity within the woodland environment at significant risk, and in the long-term will result in an unrecoverable loss of species, ultimately decreasing the usefulness of woodland as a resource. Importance of Biodiversity Biodiversity has become a buzzword of the modern political environment, and is a prominent topic among many different people and areas, including universities, politicians, schools and broadcasters. The current age is often referred to as having a biodiversity crisis, or that there are many threats to biodiversity which must be properly handled in order to conserve biodiversity. The term has become highly popular and politically centred in recent years, and humankind attempts to find ways of preserving biodiversity without compromising growth and human life. However, biodiversity itself is difficult to define, as the term is used by a wide range of people, many of whom do not define what they mean by the phrase. Throughout literature there are more than 80 different definitions of the term, which vary slightly or significantly from one another (Spicer, 2009). The definition of biodiversity that is arguably the most correct is that which was derived as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which wa s signed by 150 nations in 1992. This definition considers biodiversity to be variability among living organisms from all areas of the world, including diversity that occurs within ecosystems, between species and within species. Defining the term however, is only one aspect. To effectively address the problems surrounding biodiversity, there needs to be an effective method of measuring it. Finding consensus approaches to measuring biodiversity is an important approach to solving problems of biodiversity; however, this is not an easy task. For example, a forest ecosystem has a large amount of different species including the easily visible plants, animals and birds, the smaller organisms such as insects, and then microorganisms, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. Counting all of these species would be a large task, and does not take into account another important aspect of biodiversity, specifically , how many of each species are present (Spicer, 2009). Because of these problems , different researchers make use of different approaches to attempt to provide an indication of the measure of biodiversity within an area, such as the number of species that are present or their abundance. Often, a specific type of species may be focused on, such as studies that examine the biodiversity of birds within forest communities (Aleixo, 1999). Other indicators