Forest Research: Open Access
Open Access

Commentary on Forest Research

Tefera Ejeta^{* *}Correspondence: Tefera Ejeta, Department of Environmental cience, University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria, Email:

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Description

Forest management is a field of forestry that deals with administrative, legal, economic, and social issues, as well as scientific and technical issues including silvi-culture, forest protection, and forest regulation. Timber, aesthetics, recreation, urban values, water, wildlife, inland and near shore fisheries, wood products, plant genetic resources, and other forest resource benefits are all part of this management. Conservation, utilization, or a combination of the two is all possible management goals. Timber extraction, planting and replanting of various species, construction and maintenance of roads and trails through forests, and fire prevention are some of the techniques used. The forest is a natural system capable of providing a variety of products and services. Forests provide water, buffer climate change, provide home for species, including many pollinators that are critical to sustainable agricultural production, provide lumber and fuel wood, provide non-wood forest products such as food and medicine, and contribute to rural livelihoods.

The natural environment, such as climate, topography, and soil, as well as human activity, influences the system's operation. Human actions in forests are referred to as forest management. [Requires citation] In developed cultures, management is more complex and planned in order to attain desirable goals. Some forests have been and continue to be maintained primarily for conventional forest products like firewood, paper fibre, and lumber, with little thought given to additional goods and services. Nonetheless, as public knowledge about the environment grows, forest management for various uses is becoming more frequent.

Maintaining the structure and function of Mediterranean forests as the global temperature warms is a major problem for forest managers. Despite the need for forest adaptation, there is no comprehensive assessment of the efficacy of present management practices. We present a theoretical framework for categorizing management options that explicitly recognizes tradeoffs with other, untargeted ecosystem components in this paper. We then use this paradigm to provide a quantitative assessment of the efficacy of Mediterranean management measures. Our analysis reveals that research has primarily concentrated on tactics for reducing risk and increasing resistance in the short term, rather than measures for improving long-term resilience. Furthermore, management solutions that focus on short-term gains frequently have unintended repercussions for other adaptation goals and ecosystem components that aren't addressed. Climate change consequences on forests are becoming better understood, and certain changes in growth, drought-induced mortality, and species distribution have been reported. Despite a large amount of data, there is a knowledge and communication gap between scientists and non-scientists about how to evaluate climate change impact scenarios and what they mean for European forests. It's still difficult to advise forest decision-makers on how to best plan for climate change because there are still many unknowns and uncertainties, and it's tough to communicate them to practitioners and other decisionmakers while emphasizing the significance of adaptation planning.

Here, recent developments in climate change observations and projections observed and projected impacts on European forests and the associated uncertainties are reviewed and synthesized with a view to understanding the implications for forest management. Current impact assessments with simulation models contain several simplifications, which explain the discrepancy between results of many simulation studies and the rapidly increasing body of evidence about already observed changes in forest productivity and species distribution. In simulation models uncertainties tend to cascade onto one another; from estimating what future societies will be like and general circulation models (GCMs) at the global level, down to forest models and forest management at the local level.

Recent advances in climate change observations and projections, as well as observed and expected implications on European forests and the associated ecosystems, are discussed. Numerous studies have found that expected climate change will have a significant impact on forest growth and composition. Traditional forest management practices may need to be modified to adapt managed forests to changing environmental circumstances. In northern Germany, an enhanced version of a forest gap model was applied to a managed forest district. The model was set up with forest inventory data and then ran through algorithms designed to mimic three different management scenarios: (1) optimal timber production, (2) climatically well-adapted forest composition, and (3) maximized tree species diversity.

The techniques were compared to a standard management scenario with no response to climate change as a baseline. After 110 years of development, the comparisons were based on simulated wood production and species composition. Because Europe appears to be more affected by climate change than the rest of the world, new ideas for forest and forestry adaptation to future climatic and site circumstances are needed. In order to ensure a sustainable use of forest resources, immediate action is required. Extreme weather occurrences such as heat waves, droughts, and storms are thought to be increasing in frequency and intensity in Central Europe, as well as biotic agent activity.