Abstract
Ecological forestry is based on the idea that forest patterns and processes are more likely to persist if harvest strategies produce stand structures, return intervals, and severities similar to those from natural disturbances. Taylor et al. (2020) reviewed forest natural disturbance regimes in Nova Scotia, Canada, to support implementation of ecological forestry. In this follow-up paper, we (i) review the use of natural disturbance regimes to determine target harvest rotations, age structures, and residual stand structures; and (ii) describe a novel approach for use of natural disturbance regimes in ecological forestry developed for Nova Scotia. Most examples of ecological forestry consider only the local, dominant disturbance agent, such as fire in boreal regions. Our approach included: (i) using current ecological land classification to map potential natural vegetation (PNV) community types; (ii) determining cumulative natural disturbance effects of all major disturbances, in our case fire, hurricanes, windstorm, and insect outbreaks for each PNV; and (iii) using natural disturbance regime parameters to derive guidelines for ecological forestry for each PNV. We analyzed disturbance occurrence and return intervals based on low, moderate, and high severity classes (<30, 30–60, and >60% of biomass of living trees killed, respectively), which were used to determine mean annual disturbance rates by severity class. Return intervals were used to infer target stand age-class distributions for high, moderate, and low severity disturbances for each PNV. The range of variation in rates of high severity disturbances among PNVs was from 0.28%·year–1 in Tolerant Hardwood to 2.1%·year–1 in the Highland Fir PNV, equating to return intervals of 357 years in Tolerant Hardwood to 48 years in Highland Fir PNVs. As an example, this return interval for the Tolerant Hardwood PNV resulted in target rotation lengths of 200 years for 35% of the PNV area, 500 years for 40%, and 1000 years for 25%. The proposed approach of determining natural disturbance regimes for PNV communities and calculating target disturbance rates and corresponding harvest rotation lengths or entry times appears to be a feasible method to guide ecological forestry in any region with a strong ecological land classification system and multiple disturbance agents.
Highlights
Ecological forestry emphasizes the conservation of native biodiversity and ecological integrity (Christensen et al 1996; Seymour and Hunter 1999)
The concept of ecological forestry stems from the ‘coarse-filter’ hypothesis of biological conservation (Hunter et al 1988), which assumes that by using natural disturbances as a template for forest management and silviculture, one will, by default, create and maintain the types of habitats that would have formed naturally in the past, and in so doing, conserve most native species that have adapted to these habitats and their associated ecological processes (Hunter et al 1988; Landres et al 1999)
We described a novel approach for ecological forestry developed for Nova Scotia in response to a recent independent review of forest practices in Nova Scotia (Lahey 2018) call for more ecological forestry
Summary
Ecological forestry ( known as ‘ecosystem-based forestry’) emphasizes the conservation of native biodiversity and ecological integrity (Christensen et al 1996; Seymour and Hunter 1999). At the core of ecological forestry is the idea that natural forest patterns and processes, including both biodiversity and forest productivity, are more likely to persist or be best approximated by designing and applying forest management strategies and silvicultural systems that ‘emulate’ natural disturbance regimes (Landres et al 1999; Seymour and Hunter 1999; North and Keeton 2008; D’Amato et al 2018; Kuuluvainen et al 2021). Kuuluvainen et al (2021) thoroughly reviewed the development, ecological and evolutionary foundations, and applications of natural disturbance-based forest management, with emphasis on boreal forests. They concluded that use of natural disturbance regimes in management provides a comprehensive ecosystem-based framework for managing forests for human needs, while maintaining forest health under a changing environment
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