Abstract
The increasing and accelerating rate of biodiversity loss on a global scale is a major threat to the preservation of ecosystems integrity and the sustainability of natural resources (1). Being biodiversity hotspots, forests are particularly at stakes. In Europe, forests cover 35% of land area, host a great variety of living organisms and provide a wide range of ecosystem services (2, 3). The EU’s biodiversity strategy for 2030 (4) aims to increase forest cover and to improve forest health and resilience. This implies the promotion of biodiversity-friendly practices. Although forest management affects biodiversity by changing the structure, composition and functioning of forest ecosystems, it is also a key driving factor to restore, maintain and promote biodiversity in European forests (3). Knowledge of the links between silvicultural practices and biodiversity is therefore crucial in helping and guiding forestry professionals to implement biodiversity-friendly practices. To this end, a collective expertise was launched in France in November 2024 to study the effects of silvicultural practices on biodiversity in temperate forests, the first phase being a systematic map of the literature on the topic. To our knowledge, such a systematic map is not available yet. Several reviews or meta-analyses however gathered studies on the effects of one (5–13) or several silvicultural practices on biodiversity (14–21), but none focused on the temperate climate while including all taxonomic groups and most of the silvicultural practices used in France. This paper presents the protocol of the systematic map.