Long-term implications of traditional forest regulation methods applied to Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait.) forests in central Spain: a century of management plans

Abstract

© iForest -Biogeosciences and Forestry IntroductionOperational forestry is limited by social, ecological, economic, and legal constraints. In Spain, as in many countries around the world, forestry science originated in the Central Europe of the late eighteenth cen tury, when the main concern was wood/fuel supply and game protection. As is well known, forestry possesses a long-term nature arising from long tree life-spans that, in tem perate zones, can cover several human ge nerations. In this context, historical analysis of forest organization can be used to develop criteria and indicators to evaluate the ma nagement processes in different forest areas effectively. In spite of its limitations, this kind of retrospective studies is acknow ledged in adaptive management as a source of valuable information for shaping forest management practice. Historical studies are an attempt to demonstrate changes in ma nagement indicators, including the number of trees per hectare or wood volume by using certain variables or parameters. By doing this, we can study the long-term sustainabi lity of the management methods used. As forest management has a multidimensional impact on forests and forest communities, the best strategy in analysing management effects is to include the largest possible num ber of indicators provided by the forests management plans. Over the last decade, dif ferent analyses have been performed on changes in organized forests to observe the response to various management models (Charnley et al. 2008). The greatest diffi culties in carrying out these types of studies are the limited amount of reliable document sources (mainly management plans), because document structure changes as legal regula tions evolve. The numerical data are there fore difficult to compare, and only general trends can be defined. The limited span of this kind of studies is not strange, conside ring the difficulty of obtaining long-term, re liable, comparable data sets. In southern Europe, Spain is the only country where forest management plans have been applied effectively and indicators reflecting the silvi culture applied in the past can be analysed thoroughly. It is important to emphasize that, in most cases, the organization of Spanish forests has not included economic variables in forest management as clearly stated ob jectives. Revenue and expense information is rarely included, and it is very difficult to find the information needed to perform a proper economic evaluation. Although retrospective evaluations of forest management results are generally performed on individual forests, we can gain insight on a landscape approach over a long-term period by studying opera tional forestry documents.Forest model, permanent plot, and tempo rary plot approaches have been defined as useful tools for evaluating forest manage ment practices. All these methods have dif ferent limitations (mainly spatial and tem poral) and conclusions drawn from such studies can be limited by the monitoring design. As usual in forestry research, one of the ma...

Forest Carbon Sequestration: The Impact of Forest Management

“…Montero et al, (2005) and converting to equivalent carbon. Bravo et al, (2010) studied the evolution of fixed carbon dioxide in the Mediterranean maritime pine forests (Pinus pinaster Ait.) of Almazán (Soria, Central Spain).…”

Resin yield of Pinus nigra and Pinus sylvestris in the Slovenian Karst

“…In Segovia, Spain, the annual average resin yield per single Pinus pinaster tree was 3.54 kg between 1998and 2002and 3.37 kg between 2003and 2007(La resina, 2009, while in the Almazan and Burgo de Osma areas, the annual resin yield for P. pinaster in the last century was quite stable at around 2.5 kg/tree (Bravo et al, 2010). In the Karst region of Slovenia, for P. nigra the recorded average annual resin yield per tree was 1.33 kg (Pejoski, 1953) and 1.4 kg (Simić, 1953), whereas for P. sylvestris it was 1.06 kg (Simić, 1953).…”

Changes in the structure and composition of two Pinus nigra subsp. salzmannii forests over a century of different silvicultural treatments

“…Here, we used many years of data to report results from large areas (thousands of hectares), covering real social and economic restrictions and the natural heterogeneity commonly found in the environmental conditions of Mediterranean mountains . This sort of information is acknowledged in adaptive management as a valuable resource (Bravo et al, 2010).…”

“…Under this new paradigm of forestry science, knowledge about both biodiversity atributes [composition, structure and funtion (Noss, 1990)] and the way longterm forest mangement modifies them is essential. In comparison, the ecology of Spanish Mediterranean forests has been widely studied so far (Zamora and Pugnaire, 2001;Valladares, 2004), while it is now that the impacts of forest management on biodiversity atributes are being investigated (Montes et al, 2005;Bravo et al, 2010;Urbieta et al, 2008).…”