The Most Productive Forests

The Most Productive Forests are age[size] and species diverse (Lähde, 2007, Lähde, Laiho, and Norokorpi, 1999, Wittbecker, 1997). Hammond (1995) reports that plantations face increasing rather than stable or decreasing maintenance and restoration costs, over time; Faehser (1997) that genetic diversity can be dangerously low in plantations. Hammond (1997: 63) states ". . . the only two nutrient input phases in a forest lifetime occur in the shrub-herb and late successional or old-growth phases”. “conventional timber management” he goes on, “proposes to shorten the shrub-herb phase and eliminate the old-growth phase over significant parts of forest landscapes. [this] degrades ecosystem functioning ... and will eventually lead to ecological collapse...

Forests once surrounded the Mediterranean Sea. As the trees were steadily cut, the land was converted to an arid, inhospitable, treeless desert”.(65) The mouth of the Dunk River, PEI, was once a deepwater harbor; it filled in after deforestation and erosion.(65, not verbatim)

Risks of fire, disease and windthrow are not necessarily higher in older stands (Robinson, 1969). Older stands, with higher complexity in habitat, species and in stand and canopy structure, more established root networks and larger moisture-retaining wood chunks on the ground, are less hospitable to “epidemic”1 disease. Risks of disease and pestilence are lower in species- and even in age-diverse stands.