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Symposium

Session: : From Theory to Application: Global Examples of Ecological Silviculture for Forest Resilience

SYMP 10-3 - Ecological silviculture in the mesic forest domain

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
4:10 PM – 4:30 PM PDT
Location: C123
The basic, traditional silviculture systems most commonly applied in the United States and Canada were first developed to address an ecological concern: After widespread exploitative harvesting, key species were not regenerating naturally. For a time, focus on commodity production promoted simplicity and efficiency in design and implementation of most silviculture systems and resulting forest stands. The long-term nature of forestry required those systems to be both broad and flexible while also adaptable to a given site. As restoration, biodiversity conservation, provision of ecosystem services, and resilience to emerging threats become increasingly common and important silvicultural objectives, ecological silviculture systems build on the original concept and provide a comprehensive, alternative approach to planning and implementation that promotes the foundational principles of ecological silviculture: continuity, complexity/diversity, timing, and context. Silvicultural prescriptions are necessarily site specific, particularly when based on appropriate natural disturbance regimes, but many tools are surprisingly ubiquitous.

The mesic forest domain includes a broad range of forest types characterized by moist temperate to sub-boreal climatic conditions and a hardwood component. Disturbance regimes and associated structure and species composition vary widely, but the basic tenets of ecological silviculture still apply. We will explore the tension between a need for detail at fine scales (e.g. forest ecosystem type) and the utility of broad, universal concepts applicable to the entire mesic forest domain. To accomplish this, we will present a series of natural development models and proposed ecological silviculture systems for six representative forest types: Central European mixed forests, yellow-birch conifer mixedwoods in eastern Canada, Acadian mixedwoods, northern hardwoods, Central Hardwoods forests and woodlands, and southern Appalachian hardwoods.