Intentional Systems Management

Abstract

Conservation of biodiversity provides for economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Intentional management is designed to manage conflicts among groups with conflicting interests. Our goal was to ascertain if intentional management and principles of conservation of biodiversity could be combined into upland and riparian forest management strategies that would be applicable to various land ownerships and, consequently, help resolve land allocation problems associated with timber supply and threatened wildlife.

We used computer simulations to model three divergent management strategies for Pacific Northwest western hemlock (Tsuga hetero-phylla[Raf] Sarg.) forests: preservation with no manipulation (NMP), maximizing net present value (npv) through timber and fiber production (TFP), and conservation of biodiversity (CBD) with intentional ecosystem management. We evaluated costs and benefits of alternatives. Economic measures included npv of timber, sustainable timber revenues, total and sustainable volume of wood products, and quality premiums for wood products. Ecological measures included capacity to support vertebrate diversity, forest floor function based on the integrity of the forest-floor mammal community, ecosystem productivity based on the biomass of the arboreal rodent community, and production of wild ungulates. Index values were assigned to serai stages and aggregated across landscapes to evaluate conditions over 300 years.

No manipulation resulted in long periods of competitive exclusion that could cause species declines or extirpations. When combined with TFP, wide riparian buffers removed 35% of the landscape from active management, >200 years were required to obtain 30% late seral-forest, late-seral forest were badly fragmented by intervening intensively managed forest, and npv = $48.5 million. Small buffers and TFP resulted in no late-seral forest, ? 25 species at risk (not counting fish), and maximum npv, $70.3 million. CBD provided (1) 30% late-seral forest in 80 years and 52% late-seral forest in the long term, (2) enhanced riparian systems, (3) recovery of sensitive species, (4) npv = $58 million, 82% of maximum npv, and (4) maximum sustained decadal income. Transition costs from present to regulated (“steady”) state were large. Net present values of cost for each 10% increase in late-seral forest were as low as $247/landscape ha; costs per designated ha ranged from $1,235 (age 0) to $3,700-4,940 (age 30). Intentional management based on CBD is a net benefit solution for multiple-use and trust lands.

Key Words:

• Biodiversity
• biotic integrity
• conservation
• economics
• ecosystem management
• forestry
• landscape management
• sustainability