Franklin, Jerry F. 1995. Sustainability of managed temperate forest ecosystems. In: Munasinghe, Mohan; Shearer, Walter, eds. Defining and measuring sustainability: the biogeophysical foundations. Washington, DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank: 355-385.
We would expect foresters to know a lot aboutsustainable management. Forests take long peri-ods of time to develop, and foresters have beenmanaging temperate forest ecosystems for sev-eral centuries. They are used to taking a longview, planning for forests and planting trees thatare not likely to be harvested within their profes-sional, and often personal, life span. At the sametime, the concept of sustainability in forestry hasoften been narrow and limited to continued pro-duction of wood fiber. Similarly, our scientificunderstanding of the basis for forest productivityand techniques for assessing trends in productiv-ity, especially of the entire ecosystem and overlong periods of time, is not very robust.
This chapter reviews what we know about thesustainability of managed temperate forest eco-systems. Since this is such an immense topic, thereview is primarily an overview with an empha-sis on recent knowledge and emerging conceptsof the productivity and maintenance of forestecosystems rather than a comprehensive reviewof the last 100 years of forest science.
The chapter begins with a definition ofsustainability, taking a broad view of forest pro-ductivity and sustainability rather than simplyfocusing on the production of wood products.The first major section considers the status of ourknowledge of major ecosystem processes relatedto sustainability; it will be clear that much criticalinformation on long-term productivity is lacking,particularly on the soil ecological subsystem, andother data, such as on respiration, are nearlyimpossible to gather. Next, biophysical measure-ments of sustainability are considered along with
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some suggestions for a minimal monitoring pro-gram. Act extensive section on alternative man-agement approaches follows; development andapplication of alternative silvicultural and land-scape practices offer immense potential for inte-grating sustainable production of environmentalgoods and services with commodities. A sectiondescribing existing approaches, models, and datasets follows. The review concludes with a seriesof proposals for managed temperate forests to (a)develop critical scientific information, (b) imple-ment and test new management systems, and (c)assess long-term productivity.