Protected areas and sustainable forest management: What are we talking about?

Abstract

Recent research investigating the relationship between protected areas and sustainable forest management has revealed the need for clarity of language if cooperation is to move forward. Here, we develop a parallel framework to compare the concepts of protected areas and sustainable forest management. We address the challenge inherent in the concept of protected areas as places and sustainable forest management as a process or paradigm. Our framework outlines dominant values, management paradigms, and terms for the places managed under each paradigm. innovative approaches, within different knowledge systems, toward understanding the relationships between protected areas and sustainable forest management.To this end, our project team met several times with various representatives of the protected area and sustainable forest management sectors across Canada during 2008. It soon became clear that we could not talk effectively about issues in the relationship until we could agree on what we were actually talking about. That is, we could only make conceptual progress if we took a step back to clarify what we mean when we use terms such as "protected areas" (which usually refers to a place) and "sustainable forest management" (which usually refers to a process). It was one thing to have SFMN partners articulate a need for this clarification; it was quite another to delve deeply into these domains and be able to understand what people meant when they used these and related terms in workshops, meetings and documents. It became clear that it was even important for the five of us, coming from different academic and professional-practice backgrounds, to discipline our own language as we wrestled with difficult concepts and the even more complicated relationships among them.

The Future Use of Nordic Forests

“…Sustainable forest management (SFM) is one approach to sustainable managing forest ecosystems, but one that operates subject only to fairly vague criteria (Duinker et al 2010 ). SFM must be monitored in the light of unambiguous criteria that are currently missing in Canada and elsewhere in existing certifi cation systems.…”

Soil characteristics and bare ground cover differ among jurisdictions and disturbance histories in Western US protected area-centered ecosystems

“…By contrast, changes in plant composition and vegetation pattern and disturbance evidence may respond at smaller spatial and temporal scales to varying management activities, tracking the management mosaic. This mix of factors and scales likely generates an ecological continuum between adjacent management units (Duinker et al, 2010;Andrew et al, 2012;Wiersma et al, 2015). Within that continuum, our aim was to understand how ecological conditions vary as a function of the jurisdictional mosaic within landscapescale ecosystems.…”

What Kind of Scientist Are You? Science and Interdisciplinary Research

“…e importance of dialogue should not be underestimated; as Edwards and Gibeau (2013, p. 240) summarize, "If people cannot agree how to talk, how will they be able to talk?" We decided that this discussion across our divergent perspectives was important enough that one of the project outputs was an article about the process of reconciling our understanding of terminology and the end result (Duinker, Wiersma, Haider, Hvenegaard, & Schmiegelow, 2010), which we hope will help future debates around forestry issues move forward more quickly.…”