AUTHOR=Kuuluvainen Timo , Angelstam Per , Frelich Lee , Jõgiste Kalev , Koivula Matti , Kubota Yasuhiro , Lafleur Benoit , Macdonald Ellen 

TITLE=Natural Disturbance-Based Forest Management: Moving Beyond Retention and Continuous-Cover Forestry

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Forests and Global Change

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2021.629020

DOI=10.3389/ffgc.2021.629020

ISSN=2624-893X

ABSTRACT=Global forest area is declining rapidly, along with degradation of the ecological condition of remaining forests. Hence it is necessary to adopt forest management approaches that can achieve a balance between (1) human management designs based on homogenization of forest structure to efficiently deliver economic values and (2) naturally emerging self-organized ecosystem dynamics that foster heterogeneity, biodiversity, resilience and adaptive capacity. Natural disturbance-based management is suggested to provide such an approach. It is grounded on the premise that disturbance is a key process maintaining diversity of ecosystem structures, species and functions, and adaptive and evolutionary potential, which functionally link to sustainability of ecosystem services supporting human well-being. We review the development, ecological and evolutionary foundations and applications of natural disturbance-based forest management. We compare this approach with two main practices employed for sustainable forest management, retention and continuous-cover forestry. We conclude that these approaches potentially fail to achieve broad sustainability because they are not compatible with current understanding of multiple-scale ecological processes and structures, which underlie biodiversity, resilience and adaptive potential of forest ecosystems. Compared with retention and continuous-cover forestry, natural disturbance-based management provides a more comprehensive framework for reconciling human needs of commodity production and immaterial values with nature’s self-organized properties promoting healthy, diverse, and resilient forest ecosystems in the rapidly changing global environment.