Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Forest Ecology and Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foreco The role of topography, stand and habitat features for management and biodiversity of a prominent forest hotspot of the Mediterranean Basin: Saproxylic beetles as possible indicators Antonio Mazzei a , Teresa Bonacci a, ⁎ , Jakub Horák b , Pietro Brandmayr a a University of Calabria, Dept. of Biology, Ecology and Earth Science, Ponte Bucci, Cubo 4B, 87036 Rende, Italy b Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamýcká 1176, CZ-165 21 Prague, Czech Republic ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Mediterranean conifer forest Cucujus cinnaberinus Clinidium canaliculatum Pinus nigra calabrica Forest insect community Biodiversity conservation ABSTRACT The maintenance of biodiversity in forestlands has become one of the major concerns of global forestry. Regarding the situation of Italy, the Mediterranean forests belong to the less studied in Europe. There is an urgent need to individuate reliable indicators that help to assess forest features important for their future management and biodiversity. We focused our study on the largest forest hotspot of Southern Italy, the Sila National Park in Calabria, an upland covered by 130,000 ha of forest dominated by Calabrian black pine (Pinus nigra calabrica). We chose to test saproxylic beetle species as possible indicators of biodiversity and management. The main condition was the use of method and species useful also for forest managers. Data on the occurrence of 75 wood- inhabiting beetle species of body size approx. 1 cm and larger have been collected in 2010–2015 at 96 forest sites by multiple methods finally simplified in standardized visual census. For the suitability of individual species for indication, we used a novel hierarchical approach: starting from a model for the whole community. Target species were selected if they occupied more than 20% of the sites and non-obligate saproxylics were eliminated. These species’ responses were compared with that of the whole community and only concordant species were maintained as possible indicators. Species whose presence marked significantly species-rich habitats have evaluated as biodiversity indicators. Finally, conservation value model was used for validation. Two saproxylics met all the stepwise criteria used: Cucujus cinnaberinus and Clinidium canaliculatum. They provide a simple and useful tool for periodic diversity monitoring in nature reserve networks. Choosing easily identifiable species, rapidly detectable in a visual census as biodiversity indicators may greatly facilitate less expensive forest monitoring also by unspecialized forest managers. 1. Introduction In southern Italy a long history of human land use has led to pro- found changes within forest ecosystems (Ciancio et al., 2006). The Sila mountain plateau is the largest forested area of Calabria (Fig. 1) and is acknowledged today as a biodiversity hotspot for its floral and faunal composition (Brandmayr et al., 2013). It has elected Man and Biosphere Reserve in 2014 and this makes urgent the need to fix operational procedures to ensure sustainable management of the Sila forest land- scape, possibly by integrating forest exploitation with forest restoration and maintenance. The maintenance of biodiversity in forestlands (i.e., maintenance of species richness and threatened species) has become one of the major concerns of forestry in the European Union (EU) as well as globally. The EU and its member states implement it through the Forest Europe process (Forest Europe, 2010), promoting sustainable forest management, and the EU Council 92/43 “Habitats Directive” (Kovač et al., 2016). The Sila forest is a mosaic of strongly varying small parcels, often covering a few hectares and intermingled with pasturelands, cropland and other habitats that may differ extremely in their biodiversity. All this results in a scattered pattern of disparate habitats considered highly important for deadwood-dependent organisms (Horák et al., 2014; Šebek et al., 2015). On the other hand, the structure itself is often not directly recognizable for foresters and landscape managers. Thus, there is a strong need to find a suitable method that can be timely repeated in nature reserve networks, with species able to indicate a high value for https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2017.12.039 Received 19 October 2017; Received in revised form 20 December 2017; Accepted 22 December 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: antonio.mazzei@unical.it (A. Mazzei), teresa.bonacci@unical.it (T. Bonacci), jakub.sruby@gmail.com (J. Horák), pietro.brandmayr@unical.it (P. Brandmayr). Forest Ecology and Management 410 (2018) 66–75 0378-1127/ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T