Natural Disturbance-Based Forest Management: Moving Beyond Retention and Continuous-Cover Forestry

Global forest area is declining rapidly, along with degradation of the ecological condition remaining forests. Hence it necessary to adopt management approaches that can achieve a balance between (1) human designs based on homogenization structure efficiently deliver economic values and (2) naturally emerging self-organized ecosystem dynamics foster heterogeneity, biodiversity, resilience adaptive capacity. Natural disturbance-based suggested provide such an approach. It grounded premise disturbance key process maintaining diversity structures, species functions, evolutionary potential, which functionally link sustainability services supporting well-being. We review development, foundations applications natural management. With emphasis boreal forests, we compare this approach two mainstream sustainable management, retention continuous-cover forestry. Compared these approaches, provides more comprehensive framework, compatible current understanding multiple-scale processes underlie potential ecosystems. conclude ecosystem-based framework for managing forests needs commodity production immaterial values, while health in rapidly changing global environment.