Abstract
Forest management planning requires the specification of measurable objectives as desired future conditions at spatial extents ranging from stands to landscapes and temporal extents ranging from a single growing season to several centuries. Effective implementation of forest management requires understanding current conditions and constraints well enough to apply the appropriate silvicultural strategies to produce desired future conditions, often for multiple objectives, at varying spatial and temporal extents. We administered an online survey to forest managers in the eastern US to better understand how wildlife scientists could best provide information to help meet wildlife-related habitat objectives. We then examined more than 1000 review papers on bird–vegetation relationships in the eastern US compiled during a systematic review of the primary literature to see how well this evidence-base meets the information needs of forest managers. We identified two main areas where wildlife scientists could increase the relevance and applicability of their research. First, forest managers want descriptions of wildlife species–vegetation relationships using the operational metrics of forest management (forest type, tree species composition, basal area, tree density, stocking rates, etc.) summarized at the operational spatial units of forest management (stands, compartments, and forests). Second, forest managers want information about how to provide wildlife habitats for many different species with varied habitat needs across temporal extents related to the ecological processes of succession after harvest or natural disturbance (1–2 decades) or even longer periods of stand development. We provide examples of review papers that meet these information needs of forest managers and topic-specific bibliographies of additional review papers that may contain actionable information for foresters who wish to meet wildlife management objectives. We suggest that wildlife scientists become more familiar with the extensive grey literature on forest bird–vegetation relationships and forest management that is available in natural resource management agency reports. We also suggest that wildlife scientists could reconsider everything from the questions they ask, the metrics they report on, and the way they allocate samples in time and space, to provide more relevant and actionable information to forest managers.
Highlights
Sustainable forest management that considers wildlife populations requires close collaboration and efficient knowledge exchange between forest managers and wildlife scientists [1,2]
This opened the door for wildlife scientists to present forest wildlife management objectives as desired future conditions, at stand scales, that could be integrated directly into the comparison of forest management alternatives required by law [44,45,46]
We located these examples from a pool of 1173 review papers that we identified during a systematic review of primary research articles on forest bird–vegetation relationships [83]
Summary
Sustainable forest management that considers wildlife populations requires close collaboration and efficient knowledge exchange between forest managers and wildlife scientists [1,2]. Plot-based methods for measuring vegetation characteristics at bird sampling locations were widely adopted by ornithologists and forest ecologists, facilitating the comparison of avian data collected at nest, territory, or home range levels of organization with vegetation data collected at the scale of plots within stands [42,43] This opened the door for wildlife scientists to present forest wildlife management objectives as desired future conditions, at stand scales, that could be integrated directly into the comparison of forest management alternatives required by law [44,45,46]. We provide suggestions for how wildlife scientists can better design and communicate research studies so that research on forest bird–vegetation relationships may be more likely incorporated into forest management planning and practice
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