When forest management needs to transition to forest protection to conserve biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services: a case study from south-eastern Australia

The world’s forests play critical roles in water cycles, carbon storage, wood production, and
biodiversity conservation (Bormann and Likens 1979, Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002, Perry et
al. 2008). How forests are managed can have profound impacts on these values, particularly
where uses such as wood production conflict with other values like the protection of
biodiversity (Watson et al. 2018), the maintenance of carbon stocks (Keith et al. 2014) (Ceccherini et al. 2020), or the supply of water for human consumption (Taylor et al. 2019). Long-term maintenance of the range of values of natural forests is a key part of ecologically sustainable forest management (Lindenmayer and Franklin 2003) (Angelstam et al. 2021), where ecologically sustainable forest management can be broadly defined as: Forest management that perpetuates ecosystem integrity while continuing to provide wood and non-wood values. In this context, ecosystem integrity can be considered to be the maintenance of forest structure, species composition, and the rate of ecological processes and functions within the bounds of
normal disturbance regimes.

In some cases, attempts to implement ecologically sustainable forest management have not succeeded, with the impacts of forest management activities like industrial logging having marked negative impacts on a range of other ecological, economic and social values. In
these cases, an important land management option is to move toward large-scale forest
protection. Indeed, there are an increasing number of case studies highlighting the critical
values of intact forests globally (reviewed by (Watson et al. 2018)). In this short article, I
highlight a key example of when forest management needs to transition to forest protection to conserve biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services. I use the native Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests in mainland south-eastern Australia as a brief case study. A suite of studies of biodiversity values, water values, fire dynamics, wood supply, and economic accounting all point toward an urgent need for greater forest protection in this ecosystem and, in turn, the need to source wood products from areas other than Mountain Ash forest.