Multiaged Silviculture Managing for Complex Forest Stand Structures

This book presents the latest scientific and management information on multiaged silviculture, an emerging strategy for managing forestry systems worldwide. Over recent decades, forest science and management have tended to emphasize plantation silviculture. Whilst this clearly meets our wood production needs, many of the world's forests need to be managed far less intensively and more flexibly in order to maintain their natural ecosystem functions together with the values inherent in those processes. Developing multiaged management strategies for these complex forest ecosystems represents a global challenge to successfully integrate available science with sustainable management practices. Multiaged Silviculture covers the ecology and dynamics of multiaged stands, the management operations associated with regeneration, tending, and stocking control, and the implications of this strategy on production, genetic diversity, and stand health. It is primarily aimed at graduate level students and researchers in the fields of forestry and silviculture, but will also be of relevance and use to all professional foresters and silviculturists.

Kevin O'Hara is Professor of Silviculture at the University of California - Berkeley where he teaches field and classroom courses in forestry. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and taught for 8 years at the University of Montana before joining the University of California faculty. He is the author of over 120 scientific papers and served on the editorial boards or as associate editor of the European Journal of Forest Research, Forestry, and the Journal of Forestry. His research focuses on a variety of aspects of forest stand dynamics and their application to silviculture. However, the bulk of his research focuses on multiaged stand dynamics and silviculture. He has published over 40 papers on the topic of multiaged silviculture and has served as the leader of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) Uneven-aged Silviculture Research Group (IUFRO 1.05).