Sustainable Forestry is a forest management practice. The basic tenet of sustainable forestry is that the amount of goods and services yielded from a forest should be at a level the forest is capable of producing without degradation of the soil, watershed features or seed source for the future.
It differs from Sustained Yield Forestry and Sustainable forest management according to the sets of forest goods and services that we attempt to "sustain". The concept also assumes that human use will not detract from or degrade the use of forests by other organisms, that human use is ultimately subordinate to healthy ecosystems.
Sustainable forestry includes, clean water, wildlife, recreation natural cover and forest where seed trees are left for natural regeneration. The sensitive ecosystems are not all about the tall trees but rather the whole mosaic of forest entities. The potential natural vegetation, annual growth and the basal area, combined with the amount of trees per stand to develop a management plan for area sizes from a stand to an ownership through the entire forest, as well as considering the landscape and position of the forest within it are considered.
Certified forestry Info:
Several organizations offer auditing services to certify or verify that a forest management operation is employing best practices in sustainable forestry. The Forest Stewardship Council, based in Bonn, Germany, issues global standards for sustainable forestry based on stakeholder input from industry, communities and environmental organizations. The FSC then accredits certification bodies to carry out audits.
If a forestland passes the audit, the certification body awards a "seal of approval" which can be used as leverage in the marketplace. The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) is a similar organization........
Fire suppression Info:
Fire and insect infestations are the dominant natural disturbances in the Taiga and is an important disturbance mechanism in many other forest types, including temperate, sub-alpine and chaparral forests. Large, stand-replacing fires, particularly in the boreal forest, determine the age distribution and spatial age mosaic of the forested landscape.
In North America, the belief that fire suppression has substantially reduced the average annual area burned is widely held by resource managers and is often thought to be self-evident.
However, the idea that fire suppression can effectively reduce the average annual area burned is the focus of a vocal debate in the scientific literature.
The impact that effective fire suppression may have on the average annual area burned is important for many reasons, but in particular, its impact is key to the current paradigm of sustainable forest management in many jurisdictions. One of the core aspects of SFM in many jurisdictions is the use of wood supply models to determine sustainable harvest levels.
This determination of sustainable harvest levels often assumes that fire suppression has been effective at reducing the average annual area burned. Thus, if current assumptions about the effect of fire suppression are wrong, the impact on SFM could be substantial.
High grading Info:
One ecological advantage of clearcutting is that it avoids the risk of selection cutting and single tree management. When harvesting individual trees from a stand, some jurisdictions consider it sustainable practice to cut the tallest, fastest growing and generally best trees. This 'high grading' leaves the dwarfed, non preferred trees to make up the gene pool of the forest. The result is a short, poor growing forest, especially when there is a lack of an outside seed source. High grading has long been discredited in some jurisdictions, such as Canada, where any recent examples would be rare.
Fragmentation Info:
Urban sprawl and other construction can fragment forests. This creates edge habitat, habitat not protected by other trees and exposed to an urban environment. If the same area of forest is spread over different fragments, than there will be more edge than if all of that area were in one lump. If that same area is in a narrow line, then all of the forest becomes the degraded edge with little or no middle. Edge trees are not protected from storm wind, and are more easily consumed by deer. The wildlife living along the edge will suffer predation by racoons or may simply leave because the species will not live that close to humans.
There is also the problem of dispersal between fragments. If a part of a contiguous stand of trees is damaged, it can be repopulated by the existing trees around it. However if that stand happened to be a part of a fragment with no dispersal from the rest of the fragmented area, it would take human intervention to maintain the stands. Wildlife species with poor dispersal would suffer in this situation also, even including some birds that will very rarely fly over highways.
Solutions Info:
Using untouched reserves as a model, we can try to recreate those forest conditions. Selection cutting is a practice which mimics some natural disturbances like a tree falling down. Clearcutting mimics other natural disturbances such as intense forest fires. If we can mimic natural conditions, trees have been evolving to grow well under those conditions far longer than under modern forestry conditions, and our mimicry will yield healthier forests. Selection cutting can be based on gap sizes and woody debris found in our natural reserves.
Sustainable forestry also involves re-introducing fire to forests. This has the added benefit of bringing back a variety of wildlife species. These harvest practices can allow all successional stages of a forest to exist.
Dispersal corridors are lines of habitat that go between fragments so that wildlife can travel at a regualar rate between forests. While this helps lichens and poor dispersing plants and animals to survive in between forest fragments, it does not reduce edge effects or help protect trees from the wind. It can help the trees cross pollinate and expand their gene pool, however.
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