Can forest management based on natural disturbances maintain ecological resilience?

Given the increasingly global stresses on forests, many ecologists argue that managers must maintain ecological resilience: the capacity of ecosystems to absorb disturbances without undergoing fundamental change. In this review we ask: Can the emerging paradigm of natural-disturbance-based management (NDBM) maintain ecological resilience in managed forests? Applying resilience theory requires careful articulation of the ecosystem state under consideration, the disturbances and stresses that affect the persistence of possible alternative states, and the spatial and temporal scales of management relevance. Implementing NDBM while maintaining resilience means recognizing that (i) biodiversity is important for long-term ecosystem persistence, (ii) natural disturbances play a critical role as a generator of structural and compositional heterogeneity at multiple scales, and (iii) traditional management tends to produce forests more homogeneous than those disturbed naturally and increases the likelihood of unexpected catastrophic change by constraining variation of key environmental processes. NDBM may maintain resilience if silvicultural strategies retain the structures and processes that perpetuate desired states while reducing those that enhance resilience of undesirable states. Such strategies require an understanding of harvesting impacts on slow ecosystem processes, such as seed-bank or nutrient dynamics, which in the long term can lead to ecological surprises by altering the forest's capacity to reorganize after disturbance

Yellowstone's Prehistoric Bison: A Comment on Keigley (2019)

We provide additional information addressing the issue of whether American bison (Bison bison) were generally absent or present in Yellowstone National Park prior to its establishment in 1872. Our results support Keigley's conclusion that bison herds before the mid-1800s were absent in Yellowstone National park, and particularly the park's northern range. Our results also support Keigley's conclusion that bison had no significant role in the ecological processes that helped shape the park's original landscape.The Rangelands archives are made available by the Society for Range Management and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] for further information

Erosion and sedimentation in the Pacific Rim

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:4359.52124(IAHS-Pub--165) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo