"See the trees and the wood"

The common room in my Geography department is a little bit like a dentist's waiting area. However, instead of well-worn editions of Grazia and Trout Fisherman Magazine , you'll find lying around some slightly more academic — and considerably less read — publications, such as Scientific American and National Geographic. Today I was leafing through a copy of Nature when the phrase 'Treat forests as natural habitats' popped out at me. The line summarised a short correspondence from Bruun et al (2015) titled Forests: see the trees and the wood , a criticism of an earlier submission to the same journal for failing to recognise the natural value in forest ecosystems. This seemed right up my street, so I had to have a read of the article in question.


The comment piece (Fares et al, 2015), argues that European forest management policies should be reconsidered and centered more towards sustainability. At first, this doesn't seem at all seem unreasonable — I can't imagine many scientists supporting the practice of unsustainable forestry. However I think one has to question what exactly the authors really mean by 'sustainability'. In the hope that you get my point, I'll do my best to summarise the steps for managing Europe's forests that they suggest:

• Plant stronger, more productive tree species that are more resilient to climate change.
• Gear forest management strategies towards minimisation of disturbances (by removing dead or "excess" biomass to combat fires, and cultivation of more pest-resistant genetic lines) and maximisation of carbon storage (e.g.  more frequent harvests and greater practice of thinning).
• Focus on quantifying and expanding forest's potential economic value: the use of tree biomass for renewable energy, as well the less tangible "ecosystem services" (such as their use for recreation and the protection offered to river catchments).

Notice a recurrent theme in this? Personally, I'm surprised by how commercially focused the notion of sustainability promoted in this article is. My expectation was that, given the threat posed by rapid anthropogenic climate change, it would have described various methods to protect forests and their biodiversity. It appears instead that Fares et al's argue for shaping European forestry policy so as to extract the maximum economic value from them, and the main criticism by Bruun et al. is that such strategies "overlook the implications for forests as natural ecosystems and run counter to biodiversity sustainability guidelines".



Fallen trees can provide a habitat for "a wealth of species that thrive on dead and decaying wood"( Bruun et al, 2015) . 

Is the economic valuation of forests, particularly for bioenergy production, necessarily at odds with protecting their wellbeing (from a conservationist perspective)? I don't know the answer, but it seems like it shouldn't be impossible to achieve both. At least I hope so, since this dilemma is central to the field of work I'm interested in. Then again, especially considering what I've learnt with regard to palm oil biodiesel , I probably shouldn't be too optimistic.