Résumé :
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The sustainable management of forest ecosystems implies that silvicultural treatments and cutting regimes do not reduce biodiversity in the long term. The purpose of this synthesis is to analyse the effects of (1) size, intensity and frequency of stand opening, (2) silvicultural treatments upon different elements of forest biodiversity (including dominant trees, understory vegetation, carabid beetles and birds), and (3) to provide practical recommendations for the conservation of forest biodiversity. Current silvicultural practices tend to reduce the tree diversity at the landscape scale because they truncate the initial and/or final stages of the silvigenetic/successional cycle and are thus detrimental to early- and late-successional trees. The diversity of forest specialists is also partly reduced because large, frequent (in time and/or space) fellings prevent those species from finding a sufficient amount of suitable habitats or having enough time to recolonise after felling. Silvicultural treatments are complementary regarding disturbance regimes, but they are all deficient in terms of key habitats such as small gaps, early- and late-successional phases, senescent trees and deadwood. Consequently, we recommend: (1) extending rotations and increasing the proportion of early- and late-successional phases, (2) regenerating more often than in lowland French forests today by opening small gaps (
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