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Forests planning, management in the 21st century needs to be adaptive

Each non-industrial, private, forest landowner owns his/her property for slightly different reasons. Some of the values common to forest landowners in northeast Lower Michigan include, but are not limited to, game or non-game wildlife species, aesthetics, timber production, family continuity, and/or timber production.

Regardless of the reasons for ownership, ecologically sustainable forest management starts with an understanding that forests are tree-dominated ecosystems, not agricultural systems. The scientific community defines an ecosystem as, “…a unit of earth that includes all interacting organisms and components of the abiotic environment…” (A Dictionary of Forestry, 1998).

While an agricultural perspective to forest management was commonly taught during the 20th century, science has shown that such an approach often removes forest complexity inherent to ecological sustainability. Trees in a forest are much more than a crop. Trees are critical aspects of the entire ecosystem.

When the focus on management is solely on extraction and trees are removed as if they are only crops, the connectedness of ecosystems components and the ramifications of management actions are glossed over. For instance, removing the overstory of a forest changes ecosystem nutrient and water availability, sunlight conditions, and temperature in the post-harvested stand. These changes then have cascading impacts on other plant and animal species, even if not the specific target of the management action. Harvesting trees should not, therefore, be done lightly. One should not, for instance, just take the largest trees in a stand as if they were “ripen crops”. How and when to harvest and tree in a forest requires considerable planning and consideration of past treatments, current conditions, and future forest trajectories.

Contemporary, ecologically-based forest management tries to explicitly account for ecosystem complexity, while still promoting wildlife habitat, timber production, etc. However, how we talk about forests and how we manage forests under an ecological approach differs from an agricultural approach. For instance, terms such as “over mature” or “waste” or “messy” tend to be void if we are talking about a forest ecosystem and not a crop of trees. The natural world wastes very little and older trees that are dying or dead, even when not aesthetically appealing, provide nutrients and plant and animal habitat as they decompose. Seeds for some plant species, such as eastern hemlock, prefer to germinate on rotting “nursery logs”, for instance. Seedlings then mature while obtaining resources from the decomposing log over time.

Why manage for complexity?

Whether it be adapting to climate change or current or new tree diseases, science suggests that forests with more natural complexity are better able to adapt. One can view complexity as a toolbox: more complexity, more tools for adapting to expected and unexpected changes.

How to manage for complexity?

Each forest ecosystem type has species that evolved with different environmental factors. Therefore, each forest type has a predictable range of complexity. Just throwing new species into the mix, like we did with autumn olive and Scots pine, does not maintain or restore forest complexity.

Moving forward we need to work with, not against, forest ecosystems. The natural world provides us models for managing complexity. The study of unmanaged forests has allowed professionals to understand forest developmental pathways without human interference. Findings from such studies can then provide guideposts for management. For examples, studies of natural, unmanaged forest ecosystems can be used to guide the managed stands to have the complexity that comes from standing dead trees, downed trees, and trees of different sizes and age classes.

Approaches to forest planning and management in the 21st century must be mindful that the natural world is never static, nor is our understanding of how it works. The needs of society too change over time. Forest planning and management must to be adaptive and ever changing as well.

Greg Corace is the forest and wildlife ecologist for the Alpena-Montmorency Conservation District. For more information, including assistance with forest planning and management, email Greg: greg.corace@macd.org.

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