Abstract
Natural forests have many ecological, economic and other values, and sustaining them is a challenge for policy makers and forest managers. Conventional approaches to forest management such as those based on maximum sustained yield principles disregard fundamental tenets of ecological sustainability and often fail. Here we describe the failure of a highly regulated approach to forest management focused on intensive wood production in the mountain ash forests of Victoria, Australia. Poor past management led to overcutting with timber yields too high to be sustainable and failing to account for uncertainties. Ongoing logging will have negative impacts on biodiversity and water production, alter fire regimes, and generate economic losses. This means there are few options to diversify forest management. The only ecologically and economically viable option is to cease logging mountain ash forests altogether and transition wood production to plantations located elsewhere in the state of Victoria. We outline general lessons for diversifying land management from our case study.
Highlights
Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia; Citation: Lindenmayer, D.; Taylor, C
The ash-type forests of the Central Highlands of Victoria currently support approximately 65% of all native forest logging in the state of Victoria [30], with the majority of timber going into the pulpwood and woodchip stream [29]
Even with subsequent sawlog yield reductions following that review, the legacy of historic overcutting remains in the forest, which is interacting with a significant increase in wildfire frequency and extent [65,66]. Despite major wildfires, such as those in 2009 in which extensive areas of mountain ash forests were burned at high severity, there was limited appetite by the Government of Victoria to reduce the level of cut in mountain ash forests [67]
Summary
The mountain ash forests of the Central Highlands of Victoria, southeastern Australia (Figure 1) cover ~140,000 ha and have been the focus of detailed ecological, silvicultural, economic and social science studies for more than four decades [27–30]. Mountain ash forests are spectacular and support the tallest flowering trees on Earth (approaching 100 m in height) [27]. These forests produce, capture and filter most of the water for the more than five million inhabitants of Melbourne [7,31], the second largest city in Australia. Mountain ash forests are important for biodiversity, including a range of threatened, endangered and critically endangered species [28,32]. These forests are important for Aboriginal people, such as the GunaiKurnai, Taungurung and Wurundjeri peoples [33–35]. The land tenure of mountain ash forests in the Central Highlands of Victoria consists largely of state forests (~92,000 ha) and national parks (~38,000 ha) (where logging is not permitted) [37]. DELWP is the land manager and service provider for state forests, where it supports the government in setting and determining policy [40]
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