Resistance and elasticity: promising concepts for the management of protection forests in the European Alps

Abstract

Many mountain forests in the European Alps protect people and assets against natural hazards such as snow avalanches. These forests are mainly managed to ensure continuous and effective protection. Silvicultural operations should make protection forests as resistant as possible to natural disturbing agents such as wind that have the potential to impair effective protection, and they should increase their elasticity, i.e. speed of recovery once disturbances have impaired the protective effect. However, current management approaches do not yet consistently focus on enhancing resistance and elasticity in the face of multiple disturbances. Moreover, they use a stand level approach instead of an ecosystem-based approach. These shortcomings can be overcome by explicitly integrating resistance and elasticity into forest management. In this paper, the meaning of resistance and elasticity is clarified and illustrated with examples. A procedure to integrate resistance and elasticity into forest management is presented, with the five steps: Identification of disturbances and slow undesirable changes, identification of characteristics relevant to the resistance and elasticity of a forest to disturbances, identification of variables for monitoring these characteristics, establishment of target values for each variable, and implementation including monitoring. Suggestions to quantify resistance and elasticity are made.