Six principles for managing forests
as ecologically sustainable ecosystems
When we manage a
landscape with the focus on its natural resources it is pretty difficult to
ensure an ecologically sustainable future. Here the researchers suggest 6
principles for sustainable forest landscape management derived from insights in
an array of natural and commodity production ecosystems in south-eastern
Australia. Even though the thrust is on Australia it is likely to have broad
applicability to many forested ecosystems worldwide.
These principles
are.
(1) Landscape
management problems are typically underpinned by human-use drivers that
over-commit natural resources and undermine the ecosystem services which
support the replenishment of those resources.
(2) Not all parts
of a landscape are equal in their contribution to species persistence and
ecological processes. Special steps are needed to secure the ecological
integrity of these disproportionately important areas.
(3) Managing connectivity is critical, but it
is essential to determine what kind of connectivity is desirable, and for what
species and processes.
(4) Land use practices can produce spatial and
temporal cumulative effects with negative impacts on biodiversity and
ecological processes.
(5) Land use
decisions on the land sparing–land sharing spectrum are highly scale and
context dependent.
(6) Our
understanding of landscape-scale processes is shaped by our conceptual model of
the landscape. It is therefore important to check if a given mental model is
appropriate for a given landscape and the species or ecological processes of
concern.
The researchers
affirm that these six principles should not be applied uncritically. They say it
is best to treat them as a checklist of considerations that will help guide our
thinking about landscape change, so that we can orient toward more ecologically
sustainable landscape management.
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