Klaus J. Puettmann How can we design forestry practices that accommodate the variety of ecosystem functions and processes as well as the variety of management objectives?
As management options become more limited, what can we do to ensure that forests are able to adapt to changing environmental, biological, and social conditions? What are the tradeoffs in terms of short- and long-term productivity when we emphasize adaptive capacity? How can we quantify these tradeoffs? What flies are they biting on? These are questions that intrigue me. My colleagues Dave Coates, Christian Messier and I believe that managing forests as complex adaptive systems can be helpful in this context see A Critique of Silviculture.
A closer look at complexity science provides opportunities to learn new ideas and approaches for managing forest ecosystems see Managing Forests as Complex Adaptive Systems. But there is still much to be learned, especially in terms of how concepts and findings from complexity science translate into management applications. I have made this the focus of my research program. The goal of silviculture is to support forests and ecosystem processes and functions so they can provide desired ecosystem services.
Silviculture is at the heart of forestry and it provides the linkage between ecology and societal needs and expectations. My recent and future work in this context deals with developing silvicultural treatments that maintain or encourage adaptive capacity, so forest can respond to changes while providing income, timber, wildlife habitat, clean water, and other services.
I have worked with various large-scale management experiments, set up by my predecessors and colleagues in the early s e. These studies investigated various treatments to diversify stand structure and composition in even-aged, 30 to year old Douglas-fir stands.
