Abstract
We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-016-0772-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
We live in an era of unprecedented environmental change, motivating unprecedented global actions to protectElectronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.and restore forest ecosystems (Aronson and Alexander 2013)
Article 5 of the Paris Agreement produced by the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference places forest conservation, enhancement, and sustainable management in the forefront of climate. In this Perspective, we propose that forest definitions be applied more carefully and deliberately to achieve specific management objectives, rethinking how new forms of tree cover are classified and evaluated within different management and policy contexts
We emphasize the need to distinguish different types of ‘‘reforests’’ based on their origins, dynamic properties, and landscape settings. Building on these fundamental properties of forest types, we present a framework to illustrate how definitions applied to specific purposes vary in the importance of seven criteria: (1) value for timber; (2) value for carbon storage; (3) improving livelihoods of forestdependent people (4) whether forests are natural or planted; (5) whether forests are pre-existing or newly established; (6) whether forest are continuous or fragmented; and (7) whether forests are composed of native or non-native species (Table 1)
Summary
We live in an era of unprecedented environmental change, motivating unprecedented global actions to protect. A diverse set of forest definitions is needed to capture this forest concept in all its dimensions In this Perspective, we propose that forest definitions be applied more carefully and deliberately to achieve specific management objectives, rethinking how new forms of tree cover are classified and evaluated within different management and policy contexts. We emphasize the need to distinguish different types of ‘‘reforests’’ based on their origins, dynamic properties, and landscape settings Building on these fundamental properties of forest types, we present a framework to illustrate how definitions applied to specific purposes vary in the importance of seven criteria: (1) value for timber; (2) value for carbon storage; (3) improving livelihoods of forestdependent people (4) whether forests are natural or planted; (5) whether forests are pre-existing or newly established; (6) whether forest are continuous or fragmented; and (7) whether forests are composed of native or non-native species (Table 1).
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