Ecological Forest Management

Abstract

The heart of the book is a series of lengthy, detailed, and well-documented chapters exploring forests as ecosystems; forest dynamics, succession and disturbance; and the silvicultural emphasis on retention of green trees, snags, and logs in late-successional forests. From this foundation, the authors describe what was a major evolution in their own thinking about forest planning and management at the landscape scale. Now two decades after their involvement in the development of the Northwest Forest Plan, the authors point out that the plan was quite successful in its goal of preserving existing late-successional forest habitat and facilitating the development of younger forests toward late-successional forest conditions. In fact, they observe it may have actually been too successful. What is now most lacking across the broad swaths of forest landscape governed under the Northwest Forest Plan is early-successional habitat—what the authors now term “pre-forest”—that is critically important for maintaining the region’s native biological diversity. This includes the survival of old growth-associated species that require early-successional habitat in certain seasons, life-cycle stages, or migrations. In a section on climate change adaptation, they further note the importance of this mosaic of successional stages and the linkages among them for displaced animal and plant species attempting to follow their northward-retreating habitat zones.