A new strategy for species conservation in production forest landscapes

Background/Question/Methods

Strategies for species conservation in forested landscapes generally rely upon the establishment of permanent reserves and/or management interventions informed by species-specific requirements. Here we present a novel strategy for situations in which ecological understanding is limited and reserve creation is unlikely. Central to our approach, which we term the Optimized Floating Refugia strategy, is the assumption that a species is more likely to persist if different parts of its range are disturbed at different times. Local extinctions may occur, but re-colonization is facilitated through spatiotemporal management of floating refugia (parcels not disturbed in the current period). In production forest landscapes, this premise can be utilized via optimized harvest plans that minimize the number of species experiencing range-wide harvest in any single period. We explored this approach (which effectively assumes unlimited dispersal) along with a modified version that assumes dispersal occurs between neighboring parcels only. 

Results/Conclusions

We applied both versions to tree data from four tropical forest research sites and found clear benefits relative to non-optimized harvest plans (pattern-based and random). The Optimized Floating Refugia strategy can be 1) used for any number of species and taxa, 2) utilized in conjunction with any stand-level management regime or conservation target, and 3) integrated into more complex landscape-level optimization models. We conclude that this simple but novel approach holds great potential as a general species conservation strategy in production forest landscapes.