Abstract
Forest land managers are faced with unprecedented global pressures to produce resources for human consumption (e.g., Liu and Diamond 2005), while still maintaining essential ecosystem services benefiting society at multiple spatial scales (Costanza et al. 1997). These global pressures alone present daunting challenges to sustainable forest management (SFM) worldwide (Lunnan et al. 2004, Essman et al. 2007), but they are occurring in the context of an unprecedented rate of climate change (Solomon et al. 2007) that is anticipated to have drastic effects on forest ecosystem productivity and function (Melillo et al. 1993, Dale et al. 2001, Garcia-Gonzalo et al. 2007). The rate and scale of these social, economic, and environmental changes facing forestry worldwide underscores an urgent need to understand their multiscale interactions and use that insight to guide SFM planning efforts into an uncertain future (Innes and Hickey 2006).
Highlights
There has been a surge of simulation models developed or adapted to support the forest planning process and to clarify some of the uncertainties associated with sustainable resource management, most available models are constrained by persistent boundaries between scientific disciplines, and by the scale-specific processes for which they were created (Messier et al 2003, Sturtevant et al 2007)
Strategic and broadscale forest planning efforts based on such models are often frustrated by complex interactions among ecological, social and economic processes, each operating at their own characteristic spatiotemporal scales
A more integrated and flexible modeling framework is required, one that guides the selection of which processes to model, defines the scales at which they are relevant, and carefully integrates them into a cohesive whole. In this special feature we present several multidisciplinary projects that use a variety of approaches designed to meet sustainable forest landscape management objectives in a variety of forest ecosystems around the world
Summary
There has been a surge of simulation models developed or adapted to support the forest planning process and to clarify some of the uncertainties associated with sustainable resource management, most available models are constrained by persistent boundaries between scientific disciplines, and by the scale-specific processes for which they were created (Messier et al 2003, Sturtevant et al 2007). It weaves together two interacting themes: (1) interdisciplinary approaches for guiding sustainable forest landscape design, and (2) scaling issues underlying the integration of socioeconomic and ecological processes when modeling managed forest ecosystems. Integrated approaches to understanding multiscaled human-forest interactions through various combinations of empirical study, cultural investigations, GIS, simulation modeling, and scenario analyses.
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