Designing forest management to control spatial structure of landscapes

Characterising and regulating spatial structure of forested landscapes is an important step towards shifting the traditional focus of forest management from managing resource flows, such as timber and wildlife habitat, to managing forests. Concerns about maintenance of forest ecosystems, biodiversity and wildlife, as well as economic benefits have lead to the concept of forest landscape management. The focus of forest landscape management, like contemporary management, is the management of forest structure. Forest landscape management, however, is based upon the premise that resource flows as well as biodiversity levels and ecosystem processes are determined by the array and spatial arrangement of forest conditions, i.e. spatial structure, and its change over time. Using a quantitative description of spatial forest structure, we developed a forest landscape management design process. A geographic information system (GIS) based landscape management model was developed that incorporated harvesting intervention patterns (i.e. geographically referenced format of intervention) and forest performance indicators using spatial structure measurements. We demonstrate that geographically based harvesting patterns and performance indicators have the potential to design management for the creation of alternative forest landscapes of significantly different spatial structure. We conclude that forest landscape management, with its spatial structure focus, is a desirable evolution in forest management planning. It represents a common basis that various interest groups can use to communicate their values and objectives. Forest landscape management, however, is only possible with a GIS-based management design process in place. This must include: (i) a means of quantitatively measuring spatial structure so that objectives may be set and performance evaluated; (ii) a knowledge of what constitutes performance in spatial structure; (iii) a design toolkit of geographically referenced interventions; (iv) understanding of spatial forest dynamics; (v) a computer model.