The science of landscape ecology now underpins much of our thinking on managing forests at wider scales. One challenge has been to link our developing understanding of ecological processes over broad scales of space and time to operations in individual coupes, that is, to be able to explain the importance of landscape ecology in real forest management.
The concept of the "landscape context" is now being used to bridge that gap, in which the various management prescriptions best applied on an individual coupe are directly linked to the degree of reservation, forest maturity, connectivity and other parameters in the surrounding stand. The Southern Forests Experimental Forest Landscape anchored on Warra is being used to develop the landscape metrics needed to put this still conceptual approach into practise. The ability to monitor and predict the growth status of large areas of forest will also directly empower our approaches to the new research questions relating to carbon storage and sequestration.
Dr Steve Read
Chief Scientist
Division of Forest Research & Development
Forestry Tasmania
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