Fig. 1

An illustration of typical differences in forest landscape age class mosaic and forest stand structure and development in natural versus managed forest. a A natural landscape that was originally mostly composed of large patches of mature or old forest is fragmented into a finer scale patchwork of young forest. The landscape example comes from north eastern Canada, from the Lake Abitibi region at the border between Ontario and Québec. b Illustration of the difference in the length of time since disturbance and stand development between natural and managed forests. For Fig. 1a the natural landscape age classes are derived from Bergeron et al. (2004), while those of the managed landscape are derived from the Québec forest inventory map of the 3rd decadal program (1990)