David Salt

Plantation forests and biodiversity conservation

Summary There are five key reasons why biodiversity conservation should be considered a part of plantation management. (1) The plantation estate is large, and balancing various land management values with wood and pulp production is important when extensive areas of land are involved. (2) The locations and management of new plantations will affect the biota that currently exist in such landscapes. (3) Maintaining some elements of biodiversity within plantations can have benefits for stand productivity and the maintenance of key ecosystem processes such as pest control. (4) The retention (or loss) of biota in plantations is relevant to the formulation of ecological standards and the certification of plantations in many parts of the world. (5) Plantation forestry has a narrow and intensive management focus on producing a forest crop for a limited array of purposes. It will not meet future societal demands for a range of outputs from plantations (in addition to wood and pulp supply), and will not be congruent with the principles of ecological sustainability. This paper briefly reviews the biodiversity conservation values of Australian plantations. It shows that almost all work in Australian plantations, whether conifer or eucalypt, highlights the importance of landscape heterogeneity and stand structural complexity for enhancing biodiversity. Management of plantations to promote landscape heterogeneity and stand structural complexity and enhance the conservation of biodiversity will, in many cases, involve tradeoffs that will affect wood and pulp production. The extent to which this occurs will depend on the objectives of plantation management and how far they extend towards the more complex plantation forestry models that incorporate social and environmental values. We argue that the widespread adoption of plantation forestry that leads to homogenous stands of extensive monocultures will risk re-creating the array of negative environmental outcomes that have been associated with agriculture in many parts of Australia.

Describing the System

Aresilience assessment begins by bringing together the stakeholders—the people with an interest or a stake in the system. Many people find the term stakeholders a bit repellent because it arose out of management speak, but we can’t think of a better one. The first stage is to work with these stakeholders to determine what the components are that make up their system and how they are connected.

A Crash Course in the Science of Resilience

WE LIVE IN UNCERTAIN TIMES. As the human population grows, the variety of life declines, ice caps shrink, and our Earth system behaves in ways its species have never experienced. The past no longer provides us with a guide to how the future will behave, and we search for solutions while moving into an increasingly uncertain space. In such a time, resilience science provides important insights to help communities engage with the complex set of challenges they need to navigate.

A Resilient World

What does resilience mean when applied at the planetary scale? Our planet as a global system has changed quite a bit over the last ten thousand years, but when viewed on geological time scales it has been very stable during this period, a time known as the Holocene. Indeed, despite some changes it’s had the same identity.

Preparing for Practice: The Essence of Resilience Thinking

There are any number of ways of putting resilience science into practice, and it needs to be said at the outset that following strict recipes and prescriptions simply isn’t appropriate. Working with resilience requires you to constantly reflect on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And once an assessment of resilience is done, you are encouraged to go back and reexamine it, expand on it, and then adapt accordingly. Our focus in most of this book is on the resilience of social-ecological systems (linked systems of humans and nature). Resilience is a dynamic property of such a system, and managing for it requires a dynamic and adaptive approach.

People and Pen Shells, Marine Parks and Rules:

There are somewhere between 50 and 150 million people in the world who make their living through small-scale fisheries operating in coastal waters. They catch fish and harvest other marine resources, using all kinds of innovative methods. Unfortunately, despite their ingenuity, many of these operations are suffering from “the tragedy of the commons.” The tragedy is the overuse of a common resource leading to its collapse.* The question is, How does a fishery agree to take no more than its fair share? What is a fair share, anyway?

Out of the Swamp

The swampy wetlands of the world have played important roles in human history. The presence of water made them favored places for animals and people alike, and they have long histories of human use and manipulation. And it’s the manipulation that is of interest from a resilience perspective, since it has invariably resulted in unintended secondary effects. We begin our swamp tour with a discussion of two major wetland systems in the developing world: the Okavango Delta in Botswana and Tonle Sap in Cambodia (see images 9 and 10). Both are very valuable assets for the countries involved, and both depend on the continued flow of water from countries upstream.

Thresholds on the Range

Rangelands are places where humans graze animals for meat and fiber. At their simplest, they can be pictured as expanses of grassy woodlands or grasslands with shrubs, managed by pastoralists who graze animals on them. They are a foreign world to your average city slicker, but rangelands supply an important proportion of the world’s protein (especially to the developing world). They have also experienced significant degradation over many decades.

Assessing Resilience for “the Plan”:

In many places around the world resilience is appearing in policy and mission statements. In New South Wales (NSW) in Australia, for example, the goal for natural resource management is “resilient, ecologically sustainable landscapes functioning effectively at all scales and supporting the environmental, economic, social and cultural values of communities” (NSW Natural Resources Commission, 2011).

Practicing Resilience in Different Ways

Depending on who you talk to, resilience can mean a number of things. As discussed in the introductory chapter, the four main origins of the concept lie in the fields of engineering, ecology/biology, psychology, and defense/security. Organizational resilience is now also a growing field, and it draws on the ideas developed by the other four. Resilience in economics is another area of growing interest. The literature on resilience in all these fields is large and growing.