Resilient Forest Management

Global forest management is now grappling with ways to address the many dimensions of global change, including a warming climate and increasing forest disturbance from fires and pest outbreaks, along with changes in public values. However, the dominant forest management paradigms still assume a constant and predictable world in which command-and-control (i.e., treating long-lived forests much like short-lived agricultural crops) and single-value (i.e., timber) optimization still prevail. This novel text argues for new approaches to forest management that focus on resilience and embracing adaptability to the changing socio-ecological environment as it unfolds. Resilience is the ability of a system to maintain its essential attributes (in the form of composition, structure, and/or function) in response to stress, disruption, or disturbance. Managing a system for resilience places an emphasis on persistence rather than growth, efficiency, or profitability, which can be fulfilled by enhancing the capacity to resist change (i.e., robustness) or by enhancing the capacity to incorporate change in desirable directions (i.e., flexibility), or a combination of the two. Resilient Forest Management develops many of the same resilience-enhancing strategies for protected areas, multi-purpose forests, and timber production lands, but with different degrees of emphasis. Featured prominently are practices that enhance diversity, connectivity in space and time, and adaptive management as informed by vulnerability analysis and broad stakeholder consultation. In so doing, Resilient Forest Management builds on foundational concepts of ecological forestry and our understanding of complex adaptive systems and takes sustainable forest management to the next level. Resilient Forest Management will be suitable as a primary or supplementary text in forest policy and management. It will appeal to graduate-level students and researchers in the fields of forestry and conservation along with active policymakers in government, the forest industry, and environmental non-governmental organizations. While focused on forestry, parks managers, agriculturists, and urban planners too will find much useful insight and many creative solutions to sustainable development in a changing world.