Assessment and monitoring of forest-game balance: an exclosure experiment

During the last decades, populations of large ungulates have largely increased, strengthening the pressure exerted by these species on forest vegetation. Therefore, monitoring this pressure has become unavoidable for sustainable forest management. Such monitoring requires a rigorous approach in order to evaluate objectively the balance between game population and forestry. The use of exclosure experiment offers an interesting solution to observe the effects of game populations on forest ecosystem. When objectives expected from forest management are clearly defined, exclosure experiments can effectively be used as a monitoring tool, to allow detecting unbalanced situations, for example, herbivore pressure threatening forest regeneration. The monitoring tool combines on one side an exclosure, defined as "the real environment", fully accessible to herbivores and, on the other side an enclosure, which is the "control treatment", fenced and therefore unavailable to any large ungulates. Our main aim was to compute a set of indicators characterizing the ecological changes due to large herbivores pressure on forest ecosystems. We identified 2 categories of ecological indicators: the short-term and the medium-term indicators. Short-term indicators require only two-year of monitoring to correctly quantify herbivore pressure whereas medium-term indicators require at least 4 years of monitoring. The study site is located in Southern Belgium (Wallonia), in mixed beech and oak forests. The predominant vegetation type is the "Luzulo-Fagetum", typically found in acidophileous beech forests. The ungulate species of interest are red deer, roe deer, wild boar and mouflon. In 2006, enclosures and exclosures (4 x 4 m) were installed in 17 sites scattered in two zones with contrasted deer densities to assess indicators efficiency. Between 2006 and 2012, we performed floristic surveys and we recorded the height, density and cover of the understory vegetation of every plot