Impacts of forestry on boreal forests: An ecosystem services perspective

Abstract

Forests are widely recognized as major providers of ecosystem services, including timber, other forest products, recreation, regulation of water, soil and air quality, and climate change mitigation. Extensive tracts of boreal forests are actively managed for timber production, but actions aimed at increasing timber yields also affect other forest functions and services. Here, we present an overview of the environmental impacts of forest management from the perspective of ecosystem services. We show how prevailing forestry practices may have substantial but diverse effects on the various ecosystem services provided by boreal forests. Several aspects of these processes remain poorly known and warrant a greater role in future studies, including the role of community structure. Conflicts among different interests related to boreal forests are most likely to occur, but the concept of ecosystem services may provide a useful framework for identifying and resolving these conflicts.

Keywords: Conflict; Forest management; Sustainability; Timber production; Trade-off.

Fig. 1

Framework linking forest management activities via forest structures and functions to final benefits and values experienced by humans. Indicators of ecosystem service supply may be defined based on all of the four stages of ecosystem service generation

Fig. 2

Numbers of results returned by the literature searches using search strings related to boreal forestry and different phenomena associated with specific ecosystem services. Each ecosystem service had its own predefined set of search terms. The dark grey part of each bar shows the portion of the search results returned when the additional search term “ecosystem service*” was used. A detailed description of the literature searches, including a full list of search terms, is given in Online Appendix S1

Fig. 3

Summary of some of the main connections between forest management activities, forest characteristics, and ecosystem services. Lines connecting the boxes in the columns show the impacts of management via forest characteristics on ecosystem services. These connections also show how identification and assessment of ecosystem services may guide management choices