Silvicultural intensification for tropical forest conservation: a response to Sist and Brown

Abstract

We welcome the comments by Sist and Brown (henceforth S & B) about our suggestion that in some tropical forests, silvicultural interventions need to be intensified to promote regeneration of some commercially valuable species and to otherwise sustain timber yields. Although there is nothing particularly new about this suggestion, it is often lost in campaigns to minimize the deleterious environmental impacts of logging. We also applaud S & B’s efforts to promote reduced-impact logging (RIL) and agree that for forests well stocked with advanced regeneration of commercial species, maintaining pre-intervention forest structure by using RIL techniques represents a major step towards the goal of sustainable forest management. Given how difficult it is to improve logging practices (e.g., Putz et al. 2000; Blate et al. 2001), even when application of RIL techniques would be to the loggers’ short-term financial advantage (e.g., Holmes et al. 2002), S & B’s emphasis on logging to the exclusion of other silvicultural interventions seems justified. Also, if we had actually made a blanket endorsement of the creation of extremely large felling gaps, which was apparently S & B’s interpretation, we would share their concern about proliferation of vines and other weeds. Instead, we argued that there are conditions under which any of a number of silvicultural treatments, such as gap enlargement, vine cutting, liberation of future crop trees, and soil scarification, can be justified if they promote the regeneration and growth of commercial species. Ultimately, maintaining the value of forests for timber production may be the best incentive for keeping forests from being converted to other land uses.