Abstract
The effect of forest management has been to override the dynamics produced by natural disturbances with a dynamic of human design. Under even-aged management, the forest is held in an early successional state, providing some habitat for species of open field and edge but little for species of the forest interior. Alternatively, uneven-aged management may maintain forest interior conditions but does not provide the large-scale heterogeneity created by pre-settlement disturbance processes. The traditional choice between even- and uneven-aged management approaches condemns the landscape to one of two mutually exclusive dynamics, causing the loss of natural landscape heterogeieity and the biodiversity it supports. The conservation of biodiversity will require that silviculture move beyond the artificial dichotomy of even- versus uneven-aged management to accommodate the full range of patterns, intensities, and frequencies of the natural disturbance regime. Traditional emphases on "regenerating the stand" and "optimizing growing stock" must be replaced by an emphasis on establishing the appropriate-sized cohort in the context of landscape-scale objectives.
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