Restoring Fire-Adapted Forests in Eastern North America for Biodiversity Conservation and Hazardous Fuels Reduction

Forest Restoration Paradigms

“…In fire-adapted ecosystems, for example, large fires would often sweep across the landscape and burn with varying intensity causing stand replacement in some places and burning undergrowth in others, leaving behind a mosaic of conditions (e.g., Turner, 2010). Although this can still be seen today in some lightly populated areas such as the boreal forest, in most places there are too many roads and too much suppression activity to allow for truly natural fire regimes (Covington & Moore, 1994;Phillips, Waldrop, Brose, & Wang, 2012;Veblen, Kitzberger, & Donnegan, 2000). Defining the boundaries between the stages on the degradation gradient is a subjective, social process (Emborg, Walker, & Daniels, 2012) that relies on an individual's valuing of the condition of the forest; the level of degradation is in the eye of the beholder.…”

“…Even some managed artificially regenerated forests may be highly functional, such as many beech forests of Western Europe. Many plantation forests of native species have simple structures but on long-rotation may acquire sufficient understory of native plants to resemble old forests, such as the fire-adapted southern pines in the United States (Brockway, Outcalt, Tomczak, & Johnson, 2005;Phillips et al, 2012). Significant departures from these conditions (loss of structure and function) result in degraded forests.…”

“…One pervasive aspect of human influence has been alteration of disturbance regimes. Efforts to restore historic disturbance regimes include reintroduction of the agent, such as fire (Kuuluvainen, 2002;Moore, Covington, & Fulé, 1999;Phillips et al, 2012) or restoration of river flows and inundation regime (Hughes, del Tánago, & Mountford, 2012). Other methods seek to emulate the effects of historical disturbance regimes Forest Restoration Paradigms S171 FIGURE 1 Conceptualized forest states in terms of functionality and structure.…”

“…Functional restoration is the manipulation of interactions among process, structure, and composition in a degraded ecosystem. Functional restoration aims to restore functions and improve structures with a long-term goal of restoring interactions between function and structure; for example, reintroducing fire into a longleaf pine forest where long-term fire suppression has allowed a broadleaf midstory to develop (Brockway et al, 2005;Phillips et al, 2012;Schwilk et al, 2009). It may be, however, that a functionally restored system will look quite different than the reference condition in terms of structure and composition and these disparities cannot be easily corrected because some threshold of degradation has been crossed (Whisenant, 2002) or the environmental drivers, such as climate, that influenced structural and (especially) compositional development have changed.…”