Segregated management: A new spatial paradigm for the sustainable management of tropical forests for timber production and biodiversity conservation

Background/Question/Methods The value society places on biodiversity has led to the explicit incorporation of biodiversity conservation into tropical forest management plans, as stipulated in various global forest certification schemes. However, what management strategies that best protect biodiversity from ecological and economic perspectives are poorly understood. In this talk, I focus on the two broad approaches for jointly producing timber and conserving biodiversity in tropical forests: segregated management, in which timber production is emphasized in some parts of the forest and biodiversity conservation in others, and integrated management, in which conservation measures are incorporated into logging regimes. Drawing on data and results from the Center for Tropical Forest Science and recent related field studies in Malaysia, I develop a series of simple spatial tropical forest management models. I use these forest models to determine specific economic and ecological conditions where segregated management is superior to uniform management for biodiversity conservation under the same level of timber production and vice versa.

Results/Conclusions When the models incorporate the actual widespread spatial heterogeneity in tropical forest timber stocking and regeneration as well as patterns of flora and faunal biodiversity the models contrary to conventional wisdom indicate under a wide range of realistic economic conditions that segregated management is superior to uniform management. The presentation concludes with a discussion of how these models are informing the development of new sustainable forest management system Malaysia with a specific emphasis on the data requirements, data management, and front-end visualization systems for policy planners and stakeholders.