Question elements | Eligibility criteria |
---|---|
Populations | Included Boreal forests in Canada, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and USA (dominant tree species in the study area must be spruce or pine) |
Intervention | Included Conservation of woodland key habitats Conservation of the small protected forest patches, e.g. voluntarily conserved small areas (METSO and Komet programs) and certification-based protection Excluded Conservation of large protected areas, i.e. national parks, nature reserves, wilderness areas |
Comparators | Included Managed forests (production forests of all type, age and succession stage) Natural forests (including national parks and other large-scale protected areas and, also, non-protected natural forests) Also, SPHPs in natural and production forests can be compared to each other Excluded Small protected habitat patches different from intervention (for example WKHs and voluntary set-asides are not compared) Different small protected habitat patches within the intervention (for example stream-side WKHs and herb-rich WKHs not compared) Managed forest known to have low/high conservation values (for example areas not accepted in METSO program, forest areas receiving environmental subsidy) Non-forest lands Urban parks Wooded fields e.g. Christmas tree plantations |
Outcomes | Included Species diversity Species richness Species abundance Assemblage Volume of deadwood Diversity of deadwood Excluded All data on non-terrestrial species Density of ant mounds / predator bird nests |
Study design | Included Control-intervention field studies of small habitat patches Control-intervention studies of small habitat patches where no field study was conducted but the data analysed are originally from a field study Excluded Simulation/modelling studies (even partly simulated/modelled) Habitat selection studies Studies first mapping/finding species and afterwards checking whether the place of occurrence was located in SPHP or not |
Language | Included English Finnish Swedish Russian |