Over the hills and far away: linking landscape factors with cavity excavation on living forest trees by the Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus martius, L. 1758)
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Abstract
The Black Woodpecker ( Dryocopus martius , L. 1758) is the largest primary cavity excavator in Europe. Its cavities represent an essential microhabitat for many other forest species and the knowledge on landscape factors linked with cavity excavation by the Black Woodpecker is needed to support the conservation of this species and associated species. Such relationships should thus be quantified at different scales ranging from the stand to the extended home range. We used cavity maps established by foresters and naturalists to build a large (2689 cavity bearing trees) database distributed over several sites in France. Based on this and on a set of background points, i.e. randomly selected points devoid of cavity in the vicinity, we analysed the effects of stand composition and landscape features (forest cover, forest connectivity and fragmentation) at three different scales around each cavity and background point corresponding to a forest management unit (10ha), the core (100ha) and extended (250ha) home range scales. We showed that indices describing forest continuity (cohesion, landscape shape index) and forest tree species composition (especially the presence of mixed forests) had significant positive effects but that the magnitude varied across the three scales. We notably observed the strongest effects at the core home range scale (100ha), indicating that Black Woodpecker requirements for cavity excavation are more pronounced at this scale. The Black Woodpecker tends to avoid pure conifer-dominated stands to excavate cavities, but benefits from mixed forests, that couple favourable foraging and cavity excavation sites. The bird also prefers continuous forest landscapes with high cohesion and low edge densities. We also showed that the positive effects of forest landscape were generally larger at higher elevation, indicating context-dependence. Forest planning rarely integrates the landscape patterns. A better understanding of the features linked with cavity excavation by the Black Woodpecker may hence help to better integrate their conservation in forest management planning. Our results also show the importance to maintain mixed broadleaf-conifer forests as well as continuous and well-connected forest landscapes to favour features that benefit primary and secondary cavity nesters.
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Forests host a tremendous diversity of organisms. This is a well-established fact. However, not all forests are equal in their ability to promote diversity, and several conceptual and practical questions remain regarding the species composition and spatial extent of forest ecosystems needed to foster biodiversity. Cabrera and colleagues (2025) provide insightful information on this matter by analysing an original dataset assembled at the national level in France by professional foresters aided by amateur naturalists. Their question: Where do Black woodpeckers excavate?
It might seem obvious to many ornithologists and keen nature observers: since Black woodpeckers prefer carving their nesting and roosting cavities into broadleaved trees while foraging for food in conifers, mixed forests should be more favourable to them. Everybody knows …
Forests host a tremendous diversity of organisms. This is a well-established fact. However, not all forests are equal in their ability to promote diversity, and several conceptual and practical questions remain regarding the species composition and spatial extent of forest ecosystems needed to foster biodiversity. Cabrera and colleagues (2025) provide insightful information on this matter by analysing an original dataset assembled at the national level in France by professional foresters aided by amateur naturalists. Their question: Where do Black woodpeckers excavate?
It might seem obvious to many ornithologists and keen nature observers: since Black woodpeckers prefer carving their nesting and roosting cavities into broadleaved trees while foraging for food in conifers, mixed forests should be more favourable to them. Everybody knows that, right? But Is it really that simple? No, say the authors.
At least, not always. While the data and model outputs clearly show that mixed forests combining conifers and broadleaved species are generally more favourable to Black woodpeckers — and consequently to the vast diversity of organisms inhabiting the cavities they carve — the originality of this study lies in showing that these effects vary with the local context, in particular with climatic conditions and elevation.
I found particularly interesting the multi-scale approach the authors used to evaluate the ecological factors predicting the distribution of Black woodpecker cavities. I was also positively impressed by their effective use of different data sources, and can easily imagine the huge effort required to assemble and compare data at the tree, stand, and landscape levels. Of course, the dataset has some limitations, notably the fact that it is based on presence-only data, but the authors followed the reviewers’ recommendations and provided robust and comprehensive analyses in the final version — one I am pleased to recommend to both academic readers and those interested in forest management and biodiversity conservation.
References
Cedric Cabrera, Jean-Matthieu Monnet, Jean-Jacques Boutteaux, Baptiste Doutau, Pascal Denis, Yoan Paillet (2025) Over the hills and far away: linking landscape factors with cavity excavation on living forest trees by the Black Woodpecker (<i>Dryocopus martius</i>, L. 1758). bioRxiv, ver.6 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Ecology https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.22.497197
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