One to rule them all? Assessing the performance of Forest Europe’s biodiversity indicators against multitaxonomic data

Most broad-scale forest biodiversity indicators are based on data from national forest inventories and are used to assess the state of biodiversity through several regional initiatives and reporting. Although valuable, these indicators are essentially indirect and evaluate habitat quantity and quality rather than biodiversity per se. Besides, most of these indicators are applicable at regional or national scales, while their use at a more local level is difficult. Therefore, their link to biodiversity may be weak, which decreases their usefulness for decision-making.

This research shows that, while some indicators perform relatively well across groups (e.g. deadwood volume), no single indicator represented all biodiversity at once, and that a combination of several indicators performed better.