From complexity science to forest management

Background/Question/Methods

Complexity science has been providing insights and guidance for a variety of disciplines. Ecosystems are a prime example of complex systems, but complexity science has received fairly little attention in ecology and even less in forestry. This talk provides an overview of recently initiated efforts to utilize principles from complexity science to guide forest management activities. These efforts cover a variety of strategies, including both top-down (how would theories and relationships of complexity science exhibit themselves in application) and bottom-up approaches (how do our current and modified management approaches relate to characteristics of complex systems).

Results/Conclusions

First, scientific reviews document in detail why and how ecosystems can be viewed as complex systems. These reviews specifically focus on how viewing forests through this new “lense” provides new insights. Examples show that the reputation of boreal forests as having low diversity is no longer valid when diversity is measured across a variety of hierarchical scales. Similarly, we are assessing how principles of complex systems, such as an emphasis on cross-scale interactions, change how foresters view specific management practices. For example, costs and ecological implications of replanting efforts after small-scale seedling mortality will vary with spatial and temporal scales used in the assessment. Third, research studies explore methods for quantifications of ecosystem adaptability, such as percent cover of species with specific functional and response type traits. This quantification allows evaluation of management practices in terms of their impacts on adaptive capacities of ecosystems. Fourth, we relate principles of current forest management approaches to characteristics of complex systems. This highlights which aspects of complex system theory are “easy” to account for using current management practices and which aspects require more research efforts to be useful for managers. Last, field labs and practices in classes and cooperation and discussion with landowners and foresters investigate how current management practices would be modified to account for theories from complexity science. These efforts include directed inventories that highlight the role of multiple scales and cross-scale interactions, threshold and variables that influence thresholds, memory and legacies, and more. Students and foresters are then challenged to address all these aspects in their prescriptions.