Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Sue Lietz | | Title | How will the changing industrial forest landscape affect forest sustainability? | | Affiliation | Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service | | Authors | Sue Lietz, Eric Gustafson, Craig Loehle | | Keywords | Biodiversity, Bioenergy, Divestiture, Simulation model, Sustainable forestry | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
Global market forces in the forestry sector are resulting in large-scale divestiture of forested lands by paper companies in the U.S. The new owners often sell parcels that produce a greater return for other land uses, which in many cases is as hunting camps. Furthermore, increasing demand for cellulose for bioenergy may modify forest management practices widely enough to impact the spatial characteristics of forested landscapes. We used the HARVEST timber harvest simulator to investigate the potential consequences of divestiture and bioenergy production on measures of landscape pattern related to ecological function and sustainability in a 68,152 ha landscape in upper Michigan. Divestiture of industrial land tended to increase the amount of younger seral stages at the expense of late seral and uneven aged forests. Divestiture also tended to fragment the forest when mapped by age classes, with less of an effect on fragmentation of forest types. Divestiture of industrial land directly reduced both the amount of land open to public access and the average size of such tracts, and decreased the volume of wood extracted from the landscape. Increasing bioenergy production also tended to increase the amount of younger seral stages at the expense of late seral and uneven aged forests. Bioenergy production increased fragmentation by all measures. Our results suggest that increasing divestiture and bioenergy production will have negative effects on indicators of ecological sustainability and will reduce wood supply, although it is less clear whether these effects are ecologically significant because the slopes of the negative relationships are relatively small. |
|