Scientific Issues Related to Sustainable Forest Management in an Ecosystem and Landscape Perspective

Paris

ECOFOR

2003

62 S.

Bandaufführung

2-914770-03-0

98670

Technical Report ; Nr. 1, 62 S.

The newly established "European Network for long-term Forest Ecosystem and Landscape Research" (ENFORS) - COST Action E25, needed to specify its remit in association with its member countries. The established working group did this by giving a comprehensive overview of the scientific issues related to sustainable forest management from an ecosystem and landscape point of view. It started by describing the management questions at stake, followed by an introduction of the associated scientific questions in general, and finally pointed out a few strategic-scientific issues. Sustainable forest management is not new to European forestry, however it is an evolving concept, the conditions for which have recently been subjected to important environmental (e.g. global change) and socio-economic (e.g. increased number of stakeholders, interactions between land uses) changes. The related management questions arise in a triangular network. The apexes of the triangle are: (a) the management objectives (e.g. production, soil protection, biodiversity and water conservation, prevention of natural hazards, mitigation of climate change, social welfare, economic development); (b) the pressures on the forests (e.g. management practices, air pollution, pests, diseases, browsing, climate change, ownership, depopulation, fires, trends in wood markets, public perception, cross-sectional policies); (c) the means of control (e.g. tree species, stand structure, spatial patterns, rotation, thinning cycles, vegetation control, liming, fertilisation). The resouting management questions demand for knowledge needed, in particular in relation to the new spatial and temporal scales (i.e. going from the stand scale to that fo forests, landscapes and the biosphere with their associated temporal scales) introduced by the changed situation for sustainable forest management. Four main fields of interests describing the scientific questions in general and of a more applied nature arise from the management questions at stake. In terms of (1) multi-functionality of forests, the ecological knowledge needs to be improved to meet the demanding social expectation for each forest function, an understanding of the interactions between them is necessary, and redefinition of the conditions of sustainability of particular forest ecosystems is a concern. The (2) long-term trends in the environment mainly concern the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems, forest ecosystems as places for actively maintaining, preserving and managing the global carbon storage, and the environmental consequences of atmospheric deposistion. The questions relate to long-term effects of historic land use, landscape structure and its links to the way ecosystems function, and the conversion of one land-use form to another, make up the scientific questions of (3) land use and the role of forests in the landscape. The questions of (4) stochastic disturbances are mainly related to biodiversity and risk management.