Ecological compensation are increasingly used as a means to mitigate negative effects of intensive land use. The compensation actions often involves conservation or restoration of land elsewhere than on the impact area.
Recently, the mining company Boliden increased the Aitik mine by 376 ha destroying 250 ha of forest with high or very high conservation values. The Land and Environmental Court of Appeal decided that ecological compensation areas should be created to compensate for the impact.
In this compensation, almost 700 dead wood substrates with associated saproxylic species were translocated from the impact area to 30 experimental plots at difference densities (control, moderate and high-density plots.
My phd will assess if this methods can compensate for substrate and biodiversity loss as well as the cost efficiency of the translocation method.
The project are using measures of biodiversity of four different groups of saproxylic organisms (insects, wood fungi, lichens and bryophytes).
My aim is to evaluate this novel method for ecological compensation and restoration used to compensate for biodiversity losses at the Aitik mine.
