Impacts of Forest Thinning and Clearcutting on Plant and Animal Species Richness in North American Forests: A Meta-Analysis
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2026-04-13
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Understanding how different intensities of timber harvesting affect species richness for plants and animals in North American forests will enable natural resource managers to better control the impacts of harvesting on flora and fauna communities. Previous syntheses have only examined thinning intensity as a categorical variable, comparing low and high intensity. This new meta-analysis examines how thinning intensity affects plant and animal species richness while examining the influence of other factors. Authors find that species richness tended to be greater where thinning intensity was below roughly 50% of trees removed. This threshold does not imply that timber harvest below 50% trees removed would definitely conserve plant and animal species richness, given the complexity of plant and animal responses to harvest.
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Bai, Jin, Katie Warnell, Michelle Talal, Madison Wurst, Simon Sharp, Sadie Horner, Taylor Ricketts, Lydia Olander, et al. (2026). Impacts of Forest Thinning and Clearcutting on Plant and Animal Species Richness in North American Forests: A Meta-Analysis. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/34544.
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Katie Warnell
Katie Warnell is a senior policy associate for the Ecosystem Services Program. She is a graduate of Duke University’s Master of Environment Management program with a concentration in ecosystem science and conservation and was awarded a geospatial analysis certificate. She has served as an intern at the Triangle Land Conservancy and as a research tech with the Duke University Superfund Research Center. She has conducted research on South Africa’s bats with the Organization for Tropical Studies and was involved in a DukeEngage project on fish farming in Ecuador.
Lydia Olander
Lydia Olander is a program director at the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment & Sustainability at Duke University and adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. She works on improving evidence-based policy and accelerating implementation of climate resilience, nature-based solutions, natural capital accounting, and environmental markets. She leads the National Ecosystem Services Partnership and sits on Duke’s Climate Commitment action team. She recently spent two years with the Biden administration at the Council on Environmental Quality as Director of Nature based Resilience and before that spent five years on the Environmental Advisory Board for the US Army Corps of Engineers. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and widely published researcher. Prior to joining the Nicholas Institute, she spent a year as an AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow working with Senator Joseph Lieberman on environmental and energy issues. She was a college scholar at Cornell University and earned her Master of Forest Science from Yale University and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
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