Towards Forest Sustainability is a collection of practical essays by some of the world’s leading forest ecologists and managers from the United States of America, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. The authors describe the changes that have taken place in forest management – highlighting what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons that have been learned. This unique set of essays documents the drivers of the change in the logging industry and the resulting outcomes. It provides real-world insights from an international perspective into government policy, industry concerns, and conservation and biodiversity issues.

The Forest Service stumbled in responding to a wave of lawsuits from environmental groups in the late 20th Century--a phenomenon best symbolized by the spotted owl controversy that shut down logging on public forests in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. The agency was brought to its knees, pitted between a powerful timber industry that had been having its way with the national forests for decades, and organized environmentalists who believed public lands had been abused and deserved better stewardship. Toward a Natural Forest offers an insider's view of this tumultuous time in the history of the Forest Service, presenting twin tales of transformation, both within the agency and within the author's evolving environmental consciousness. Drawing on the author's personal experience and his broad professional knowledge, Toward a Natural Forest illuminates the potential of the Forest Service to provide strong leadership in global conservation efforts. Those interested in our public lands--environmentalists, natural resource professionals, academics, and historians--will find Jim Furnish's story deeply informed, thought-provoking, and ultimately inspiring.

Fundamental changes have occurred in all aspects of forestry over the last 50 years, including the underlying science, societal expectations of forests and their management, and the evolution of a globalized economy. This textbook is an effort to comprehensively integrate this new knowledge of forest ecosystems and human concerns and needs into a management philosophy that is applicable to the vast majority of global forest lands. Ecological forest management (EFM) is focused on policies and practices that maintain the integrity of forest ecosystems while achieving environmental, economic, and cultural goals of human societies. EFM uses natural ecological models as its basis contrasting it with modern production forestry, which is based on agronomic models and constrained by required return-on-investment. Sections of the book consider: 1) Basic concepts related to forest ecosystems and silviculture based on natural models; 2) Social and political foundations of forestry, including law, economics, and social acceptability; 3) Important current topics including wildfire, biological diversity, and climate change; and 4) Forest planning in an uncertain world from small privately-owned lands to large public ownerships. The book concludes with an overview of how EFM can contribute to resolving major 21st century issues in forestry, including sustaining forest dependent societies.

For decades, conservation and research initiatives in tropical forests have focused almost exclusively on old-growth forests because scientists believed that these “pristine” ecosystems housed superior levels of biodiversity. With Second Growth, Robin L. Chazdon reveals those assumptions to be largely false, bringing to the fore the previously overlooked counterpart to old-growth forest: second growth. Even as human activities result in extensive fragmentation and deforestation, tropical forests demonstrate a great capacity for natural and human-aided regeneration. Although these damaged landscapes can take centuries to regain the characteristics of old growth, Chazdon shows here that regenerating—or second-growth—forests are vital, dynamic reservoirs of biodiversity and environmental services. What is more, they always have been. With chapters on the roles these forests play in carbon and nutrient cycling, sustaining biodiversity, providing timber and non-timber products, and integrated agriculture, Second Growth not only offers a thorough and wide-ranging overview of successional and restoration pathways, but also underscores the need to conserve, and further study, regenerating tropical forests in an attempt to inspire a new age of local and global stewardship.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book provides an unprecedented synthesis of the current status of scientific and management knowledge regarding global rangelands and the major challenges that confront them. It has been organized around three major themes. The first summarizes the conceptual advances that have occurred in the rangeland profession. The second addresses the implications of these conceptual advances to management and policy. The third assesses several major challenges confronting global rangelands in the 21st century. This book will compliment applied range management textbooks by describing the conceptual foundation on which the rangeland profession is based. It has been written to be accessible to a broad audience, including ecosystem managers, educators, students and policy makers. The content is founded on the collective experience, knowledge and commitment of 80 authors who have worked in rangelands throughout the world. Their collective contributions indicate that a more comprehensive framework is necessary to address the complex challenges confronting global rangelands. Rangelands represent adaptive social-ecological systems, in which societal values, organizations and capacities are of equal importance to, and interact with, those of ecological processes. A more comprehensive framework for rangeland systems may enable management agencies, and educational, research and policy making organizations to more effectively assess complex problems and develop appropriate solutions.

This book highlights mathematical research interests that appear in real life, such as the study and modeling of random and deterministic phenomena. As such, it provides current research in mathematics, with applications in biological and environmental sciences, ecology, epidemiology and social perspectives. The chapters can be read independently of each other, with dedicated references specific to each chapter. The book is organized in two main parts. The first is devoted to some advanced mathematical problems regarding epidemic models; predictions of biomass; space-time modeling of extreme rainfall; modeling with the piecewise deterministic Markov process; optimal control problems; evolution equations in a periodic environment; and the analysis of the heat equation. The second is devoted to a modelization with interdisciplinarity in ecological, socio-economic, epistemological, demographic and social problems. Mathematical Modeling of Random and Deterministic Phenomena is aimed at expert readers, young researchers, plus graduate and advanced undergraduate students who are interested in probability, statistics, modeling and mathematical analysis.

This book addresses global and subnational issues concerning the world's forests, societies, and environment from an independent and non-governmental point of view. Cooperation on a global scale is not only commendable, it is essential if solutions to the problems facing the world's forests are to be found. To achieve this, modern science needs to draw a clearer picture of relationships between forests, human activity, and the environment, and of the consequences of environmental change for the societies' development and growth. There are several - partly intermingled - evolutionary forest transitions underway: the slow transition from forest area decrease to an increase in the North while deforestation and degradation continues in the South. Although not all deforestation is considered negative, serious social, economic, and environmental costs may be associated with excessive deforestation. Deforestation control is just the first step on the stony path towards sustainable forest management. The forest management transition refers to the shift in the utilization towards managed semi-natural, secondary forests and plantation forests. There are some signs in the North of the forest paradigm shift from sustainable yield to forest ecosystem concepts. How deforestation can be tackled and how these concurrent transitions are effected will have profound implications for the future. These processes involve several challenges with South-North dimensions. A search for an optimum mix of public policies and markets is a global priority both as a forest policy issue and as an inter-sectoral item on the political agenda. Deforestation and transition is discussed here by a team of 14 scientists from both the North and the South. This book offers knowledge, facts, and information about world forests, society, and environment to help us towards equity in our use of the global forest – to create a clearer vision of unasylva.