Forest Stand Structure and Development: Implications for Forest Management

A general premise of forest managers is that modern silviculture should be based, in large part, on natural disturbance patterns and species' adaptations to these disturbances. An understanding of forest stand dynamics is therefore a prerequisite to sound forest management. This paper provides a brief overview of forest stand development, stand structures, and disturbance regimes and discusses the implications of applying this information to forest management in the Sierra Nevada. It focuses on three forest types that comprise the bulk of the managed land base: mixed conifer, ponderosa pine, and red fir forests.