Towards a common approach to defining forest management intensity

Abstract

Forests play a crucial role in regulating the global climate, preserving biodiversity and providing essential ecosystem services; however, in the context of global change and anthropogenic pressures, it becomes ever more important to understand, evaluate and harmonize human interventions in forest ecosystems. Therefore, a comprehensive assessment of forest management practices is essential for promoting the sustainability and resilience of these systems. To this end, this study proposes a new index for assessing forest management intensity (FMI), which classifies forest management schemes on the basis of their demands. The values of the index are expected to range from 0, representing no management, to 3, indicating high-intensity management. The index comprises three factors: the degree of extractive impact on the ecosystem, the financial resources required and the input required from forest managers. In addition to conceptualization of the index, this work also presents a case study in which different examples of management schemes are evaluated, and the results confirm that management schemes requiring higher input, greater care and higher productive capacity yield higher values of the index than alternatives with longer rotations or lower productivity. Moreover, multifunctional systems demand more management input than traditional production systems for the same species. Furthermore, the study highlights that even old-growth forests, while minimally managed, require some level of attention, as abandonment of forests is associated with zero-intensity management. In conclusion, the FMI proves to be a valuable tool for assessing and comparing forest management practices at multiple scales (regional, national, and European), while highlighting the need for harmonized indicators to support coherent and informed decision-making in forest policy and sustainability planning. It is also possible to use each factor independently to provide insights into optimizing management strategies, by characterizing the management practices applied, and as a useful guide to developing more sustainable forestry approaches.