Sustainable Forest Ecosystem Management
Sustainability is a central tenet of good forest management and silviculture. Sustainability has several facets. Traditionally, foresters thought in terms of sustained yield, i.e. the regulated continuous production of wood and other benefits. Biological sustainability today incorporates the concept of ensuring the land and forest will be able to supply benefits into perpetuity and will not become degraded. This implies that forest ecosystems must remain unimpaired for future generations. Further, sustainability also includes long-term economic and social support for society. Such principles should apply to the production of biomass for energy just as they apply to any forest management.
Richardson (2002) suggests that "the concept of sustainability is summed up in the North American aboriginal idea of a forest for seven generations. The greatest span of time that any individual is likely to know about personally, is represented by the seven generations from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren. Very few, if any of us, will have direct experience of human contact beyond a period of 250 years. The challenge of a forest for seven generations is that it must be the same...(for all these generations)...The intrinsic values and benefits that can be derived from the forest must remain unchanged. That is the concept of sustainability." He further emphasizes that we need to learn what is sustainable from past experience, scientific study, and rigorous analysis.
For a detailed review of forest sustainability in the United States, covering a wide range of sustainability indicators, see the National Report on Sustainable Forests - 2003 (USDA, 2004).
In-depth discussions about sustainability can be found in the following sections:
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