Landscape ecology and forest management: Developing an effective partnership

Landscape ecologists have been eager to make their research applicable to forest management. We examine how landscape ecology has contributed to shaping the way forest management is currently practiced. Landscape ecology research in forested ecosystems call be divided into two general areas: (1) the study of fragmentation issues, which focuses on the effects of forest fragmentation on species conservation and (2) the development of landscape projection models, which focuses on patch dynamics and the effects of spatial arrangement of patches on ecosystem processes. Fragmentation issues have become priorities in the minds of forest managers but research to date has over-emphasized the effects of landscape structure oil species conservation. We suggest that the research focus should move toward the study of threshold effects of landscape change on the relative influence of habitat loss and habitat configuration on species conservation in forest-dominated landscapes. Landscape projection models are rapidly becoming important tools in forest management planning, and they hold great promise as a means to bring landscape ecologists and forest managers together. The ability to produce future landscapes under different management scenarios and to compare these to landscapes produced by natural disturbance regimes will help to focus both managers and scientists oil understanding the key interactions among human activities, landscape features, and ecological processes.