The list of forest affinities for animals in Central Europe – A valuable resource for ecological analysis and monitoring in forest animal communities?

Abstract Since 2011 a list of the forest affinities of all forest species of vascular plants, bryophytes, and ferns known from Germany, is available. Recently, the first comparable lists of the forest affinities of animal species were published. These lists include a categorization of forest affinities for all species of Crassiclitellata: Lumbricidae (earth worms), Araneae (spiders), Opiliones (harvestmen), Pseudoscorpiones (pseudoscorpions), Hemiptera: Heteroptera (true bugs), Coleoptera (beetles), Hymenoptera: Aculeata (ants, bees, wasps), Lepidoptera: Macrolepidoptera (butterflies, moths partly) and Aves (birds) known from Germany. The lists are a valuable resource that have the potential to add new layers of discovery to analyses of forest animal communities. Here we present a summary of the lists. We also re-analyze existing data sets in light of forest affinities to highlight possible applications of these lists in ecological assessments and characterizations of animal communities in central European forests. We show that the forest affinity lists can add valuable new insights for analyzing community structure, temporal community dynamics or communities across ecological gradients, represent an important tool for developing conservation strategies, and can be used to clear a dataset of chance findings of allochtonous specimens prior to analysis.