The doctoral dissertation in the field of Forestry will be examined at the Faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology, Joensuu campus and online.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
My research examines how biomass production systems interact with surrounding landscapes. Biomass plantations and energy crops have been promoted as a path toward energy independence and reduced carbon emissions, with short-rotation plantations positioned as a key contributor, yet their environmental benefits remain debated.
Using spatial data on plantation location, land use, and ecosystem services, together with landscape connectivity models and spatial optimization approaches, this work identifies the land-use contexts in which plantations could enhance or maintain ecosystem services and landscape connectivity, offering a spatial framework to help planners and policymakers balance production goals with environmental sustainability.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
Overall, we found that the impact of biomass plantation systems in Europe is highly variable and depends on multiple factors. Plantation location, along with the configuration of surrounding habitat patches, can be key to enhancing land-use diversity and providing movement pathways for fauna.
However, when plantations are established on forested land and are large in size, they risk homogenizing the landscape, with negative consequences for biodiversity. Furthermore, while some bird species can use plantations as habitat, others such as farmland songbirds (e.g. skylarks) and specialists such as cavity-nesting birds (e.g. woodpeckers) can be negatively affected by them. It is therefore important to carefully consider plantation placement within the landscape.
Additionally, the management applied to planted forests is key to maintaining ecosystem service provision. We found that allocating sustainable management actions across a mixed forest-plantation landscape can achieve high levels of ecosystem service provision at low profit losses, and that targeting these actions strategically can help meet ambitious conservation targets.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
As part of this work, we built an extensive database that harmonizes existing information on the location of biomass systems and their surrounding land-use context (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15396453). I hope this resource allows researchers, farmers, and landscape planners to explore their own questions and develop spatially explicit proposals for managing working landscapes more sustainably.
While biomass systems cannot replace the ecological value of natural habitats, they can, in the right contexts, serve as a complementary tool for biodiversity conservation. My thesis explores how to strategically plan and manage such landscapes to balance profitability, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem service provision, offering insights that can guide the development of multifunctional landscapes where different land uses coexist.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
One key landscape property modeled in my thesis was landscape connectivity: the degree to which a landscape allows movement. I used graph theory to model functional connectivity for focal bird species across agricultural landscapes in Spain and France, representing the landscape as a network of habitat patches linked by potential dispersal routes, and showing how poplar plantations along riparian corridors can act as steppingstones connecting larger forest patches. These computationally heavy models were run using resources from the CSC – IT Center for Science.
Two other papers addressed complementary aspects: one assessed land-use diversity around biomass production systems across Europe, and the other applied multi-objective spatial optimization (via the R package Multiscape, a MILP framework) to poplar plantations, allocating management actions to maximize timber profit while meeting conservation targets for ecosystem services.
Is there something else about your doctoral dissertation you would like to share in the press release?
For anyone interested in the second paper, we published a press release with some of the key insights: Well-placed poplar plantations can enhance forest connectivity for birds.
I'd also like to mention that this work relied on fairly heavy computation to build the models, and I was fortunate to have access to the infrastructure provided by CSC – IT Center for Science (https://csc.fi/en/). I'd recommend it to any researcher whose work has similar computational demands.
Finally, it's worth highlighting that the spatial optimization for my last manuscript was carried out using Multiscape, a novel R package developed just this year by José Salgado.
The doctoral dissertation of Sara Pineda-Zapata, MSc (Agr & For), entitled Strategic landscape-level integration of biomass production and ecosystem services at European level will be examined at the Faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology, Joensuu campus and online. The opponent will be Professor Santiago Saura Martínez de Toda, Universidad politécnica de Madrid, and the custos will be Professor Blas Mola Yudego, University of Eastern Finland. Language of the public defence is English.
For further information, please contact:
Sara Pineda-Zapata, [email protected]
