Will forestry follow agriculture toward unsustainable soil depletion?

Abstract

Human settlement has increased food production by progressively converting complex, self-managing natural ecosystems with tight nutrient cycles into simplified, intensively-managed agricultural ecosystems that are subject to nutrient leaching. Conventional stem wood forest harvesting is now poised to be replaced by intensive harvesting of biomass to substitute for increasingly scarce non renewable fossil fuels. Removal of nutrient-rich forest biomass (harvesting slash) can not be sustained in the long term.