Towards better practices of salvage logging for reducing the ecosystem impacts in Mediterranean burned forests

doi:10.3832/ifor3380-013

Towards better practices of salvage logging for reducing the ecosystem impacts in Mediterranean burned forests

Pere Pons⁽¹⁾ , Josep Rost^(1-2), Carles Tobella⁽¹⁾, Roger Puig-Gironès⁽¹⁾, Josep M Bas⁽¹⁾, Marc Franch⁽¹⁾, Eduard Mauri⁽³⁾

iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry, Volume 13, Issue 5, Pages 360-368 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.3832/ifor3380-013
Published: Aug 25, 2020 - Copyright © 2020 SISEF

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An average of 213,000 ha of European forest is affected by fire every year, with 90% of this area corresponding to Mediterranean countries. The timber of the burned forests is usually harvested by clearcutting over large areas to be used mainly as bioenergy. Recent scientific evidence has shown the strong impact that these “salvage logging” practices have on the ecosystem. However, forest owners and companies largely ignore academic debate, and salvage logging decisions are usually taken for economic, practical and emotional reasons. We propose a process to connect scientists and practitioners with the aim of providing evidence-based guidelines to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services, which can be used as a general model. The process involves five steps: (1) to review the available scientific knowledge on post-fire forest management; (2) to synthesize the information to produce a handbook of best practices in Mediterranean burned forests; (3) to provide a tool to help decision-making in post-fire management; (4) to actively disseminate this knowledge to the forest sector; and (5) to fill knowledge gaps with new experimental studies aimed to assess the environmental impact of some of the most feasible management alternatives. The feedback of the forest sector has been obtained along the process, and recommendations for better practices are already being promoted among forest owners by the administration. We suggest that similar processes can be conducted in other socio-environmental contexts to improve the management of disturbed forests and to generalize our knowledge on the topic.

Keywords

Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services, Evidence-based Management, Salvage Logging, Sustainable Logging, Wildfires

Authors’ address

(1)

0000-0002-2196-5544
0000-0003-4053-5141
0000-0001-9341-367X
0000-0002-4692-8192
0000-0001-5567-5214
0000-0001-9503-1608
Departament de Ciències Ambientals, Universitat de Girona, 17003 Girona, Catalonia (Spain)

(2)

0000-0003-4053-5141
Departament de Biociències, Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya, 08500 Vic, Catalonia (Spain)

(3)

European Forest Institute - Mediterranean Facility, 08025 Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain)

Corresponding author

Pere Pons
pere.pons@udg.edu

Citation

Pons P, Rost J, Tobella C, Puig-Gironès R, Bas JM, Franch M, Mauri E (2020). Towards better practices of salvage logging for reducing the ecosystem impacts in Mediterranean burned forests. iForest 13: 360-368. - doi: 10.3832/ifor3380-013

Academic Editor

Davide Ascoli

Paper history

Received: Feb 20, 2020
Accepted: Jun 15, 2020

First online: Aug 25, 2020
Publication Date: Oct 31, 2020
Publication Time: 2.37 months

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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