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

Wind-throw mortality in the southern boreal forest: effects of species, diameter and stand age

1. Patterns of tree mortality as influenced by species, diameter and stand age were assessed across a gradient in wind disturbance intensity in a southern boreal forest in Minnesota, USA. Few previous studies have addressed how wind impacts boreal forests where fire was historically the dominant type of disturbance. 2. We surveyed 29 334 trees of nine species within a 236 000 ha blowdown in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), in forests that have never been logged and were not salvaged after the windstorm. Within the disturbed area, a range of disturbance severity from zero to complete canopy mortality was present, overlaying an existing mosaic of fire origin stands. For this study, we derived an index of wind disturbance intensity by standardizing the observed disturbance severity using common species with similar diameter at breast height (d.b.h.) distributions. We then used multiple logistic regression to assess patterns of tree mortality across gradients in tree size and wind intensity index, and for three stand ages. 3. Probability of mortality was higher with increasing ln d.b.h. for all nine species, with two species (Abies balsamea and Picea mariana) showing much more dramatic shifts in mortality with d.b.h. than the others. As hypothesized, the species most susceptible to windthrow at all d.b.h. classes were early successional and shade intolerant (Pinus banksiana, Pinus resinosa, Populus tremuloides) and those least susceptible were generally shade tolerant (e.g. Thuja occidentalis, Acer rubrum), although the intolerant species Betula papyrifera also had low mortality. 4. Mortality rates were higher in mature (c. 90 years old) stands than for old and very old (c. 126–200 years old) stands, probably because old stands had already gone through transition to a multi-aged stage of development. 5. Synthesis . Quantification of canopy mortality patterns generally supports disturbance-mediated accelerated succession following wind disturbance in the southern boreal forest. This wind-induced weeding of the forest favoured Thuja occidentalis, Betula papyrifera and Acer rubrum trees of all sizes, along with small Abies balsamea and Picea mariana trees. Overall, the net impact of wind disturbance must concurrently consider species mortality probability, abundance and diameter distributions