An Ecological Framework for Planning for Forest Health

Concerns for maintaining biodiversity have led to the adoption of ecosystem management as the paradigm for federal land management. This approach will identify desired future conditions as the goal for management, based on ecological objectives for a given landscape. Some management efforts attempt to identify desired future conditions based on existing successional stages as defined by a classification of overstory vegetation types. Such an approach ignores most of the underlying ecological parameters of the landscape, and is inadequate for identifying past disturbance regimes and future successional pathways. An assessment of desired future conditions based on an ecological classification system is essential to overcome these inadequacies. The strategy proposed in this paper uses an appropriate ecological land classification, based on either ecological land types or habitat types, included in a broader hierarchical classification system. It also uses a vegetation map of existing overstory vegetation. These two maps are overlaid to generate polygons of ecological units that can then be used to create an ecosystem diversity matrix. Each polygon (stand) can be evaluated as to its composition and structure relative to its possible placement within the ecosystem diversity matrix through comparisons with historical ranges of variability. The overall ecosystem diversity matrix can then be examined in terms of the distribution of successional stages within each habitat type or ecological land type. The goal should be to maintain at least adequate ecological representation of all successional stages within each habitat type that occurred historically, based on past disturbance regimes. Adequate ecological representation is defined as sufficient size and distribution of inherent ecosystems to maintain viable populations of all endemic species dependent on these ecosystems. This approach can maintain and enhance regional biodiversity, but also maintain flexibility in land management options.