A Proposal to Combine Wood-Production and Biodiversity Management by a Landscape Ecological Approach in Boreal Europe

Abstract

The goals of forest management have become more and more diverse in the past few decades. In addition to the traditional wood and other production functions, the aims of forest management now include also such aspects as the cultural values of forests and maintaining a desired level of biodiversity.

The landscape ecological approach may help in achieving the objectives forest management is currently facing. It is a hierarchical system of climatic vegetation zones and landscape units, forest types, stand development stages and species communities.

This paper attempts to outline a system which includes a desirable biodiversity as an aim in the boreal coniferous wood-production forests where wild fires have been eliminated and have lost their role as the most important maintainer of biodiversity. The system is constructed by logical reasoning using the available information in the frame of references of the landscape ecological approaches used in the Russian and Canadian forest classification systems illustrated in Appendices 1 and 2.