Forestry and Biodiversity: Learning How to Sustain Biodiversity in Managed Forests

Sustainable management is a problem for countries that depend on natural resources. Forests contain most of the world’s biodiversity and offer significant renewable resources with a potentially small ecological and carbon footprint. Yet the global demand for forest products has increased while the need to conserve biodiversity and endangered species has become more urgent and challenging. Sustainable management in the forestry sector is complicated by the size and slow growth of commercial forests. Forestry and Biodiversity makes the case for adaptive management – a structured approach to learning by doing – to sustain biodiversity in managed forests. It draws on the theory and principles of conservation biology and forest ecology and illustrates them, and the challenges they present, through a practical, real-world study of a 1.1 million hectare commercial operation in a coastal temperate rainforest. The authors present the results honestly – not everything worked as intended – the problems they encountered suggest where the boundaries of science stop and social choices must be made. Forestry and Biodiversity describes an innovate program for sustaining biodiversity in managed forests that will be of interest to those who plan, or hope to influence, forest practices and to those who are concerned with wildlife, climate change, and the environment.