Hierarchical forest management planning and sustainable forest management in the boreal forest

In keeping with international efforts to encourage sustainable forest management, new legislation, regulations, and certification criteria have been brought into effect across boreal regions of the world in the past decade or less. These initiatives have established hierarchical systems of forest management planning that consider multiple uses of the forest and various aspects of sustainable forest management at different scales. We describe the systems established in Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, Russia, Finland, and Sweden. Most jurisdictions employ some form of three-level planning framework, in which strategic, tactical, and operational plans and considerations are presented with successively greater detail and spatial explicitness. However, planning scales and time horizons vary considerably, as does the level of consideration given to biodiversity and social concerns. We examine these systems in the context of sustainable forest management, raising a number of questions to be addressed in future research, adaptive management, and policy reform. In particular, we note (1) a need of new landscape and regional planning tools to evaluate the long-term and large-scale impacts of various land uses and (2) a general lack of responsiveness to global carbon and climate change concerns

Forest processes from stands to landscapes: exploring model forecast uncertainties using cross-scale model comparison

Forest management practices conducted primarily at the stand scale result in simplified forests with regeneration problems and low structural and biological diversity. Landscape models have been used to help design management strategies to address these problems. However, there remains a great deal of uncertainty that the actual management practices result in the desired sustainable landscape structure. To investigate our ability to meet sustainable forest management goals across scales, we assessed how two models of forest dynamics, a scaled-up individual-tree model and a landscape model, simulate forest dynamics under three types of harvesting regimes: clearcut, gap, and uniform thinning. Althougth 50– 100 year forecasts predicted average successional patterns that differed by less than 20% between models, understory dynamics of the landscape model were simplified relative to the scaled-up tree model, whereas successional patterns of the scaled-up tree model deviated from empirical studies on the driest and wettest landtypes. The scale dependencies of both models revealed important weaknesses when the models were used alone; however, when used together, they could provide a heuristic method that could improve our ability to design sustainable forest management practices

Optimizing spatial habitat suitability and timber revenue in long-term forest planning

Effective tools must be developed that include consideration of biodiversity in the traditional forest planning process. The objective of this study is to present a spatial habitat suitability model that could be included in the optimization of long-term forest planning where the problem can be solved with an exact solution method. This could be an advantage, since, e.g., many forest planning systems available today are designed for problems that could be solved with an exact solution method. The habitat model consists of two parts: suitability assessment of stand-wise conditions and spatial conditions. To investigate whether the model works in a realistic setting, we used a case study and applied the model to the habitat demands for Hazel Grouse (Bonasa bonasia L.). The results from the case study indicate that the model is effective for including spatial habitat consideration and that the model could be used for creating different degrees of the clustering of habitats. Further, the loss in net present value as a result of the spatial habitat demands was limited in the case study. We suggest that this modeling approach could be extended to other species with large area requirements and add to the existing tools for forest biodiversity assessment in forest management planning

From management to stewardship: Viewing forests as complex adaptive systems in an uncertain world

The world's forests and forestry sector are facing unprecedented biological, political, social, and climatic challenges. The development of appropriate, novel forest management and restoration approaches that adequately consider uncertainty and adaptability are hampered by a continuing focus on production of a few goods or objectives, strong control of forest structure and composition, and most importantly the absence of a global scientific framework and long-term vision. Ecosystem-based approaches represent a step in the right direction, but are limited in their ability to deal with the rapid pace of social, climatic, and environmental changes. We argue here that viewing forest ecosystems as complex adaptive system provides a better alternative for both production- and conservation-oriented forests and forestry. We propose a set of broad principles and changes to increase the adaptive capacity of forests in the face of future uncertainties. These span from expanding the sustained-yield, single-good paradigm to developing policy incentives and interventions that promote self-organization and integrated social-ecological adaptation