Fig. 5

Representations of different forest stands with various trajectories following forest harvesting. The stand characteristics (y-axis) represent various stand structures, compositions and volumes as well as habitats for living creatures. The stand trajectory to point A could represent a forest managed through single-tree selection, while the trajectory to point B could represent a similar forest managed as an intensive even-aged and single-species plantation, which has consequently a very small envelope of ecological characteristics. In both cases, ecological characteristics develop in a narrow predictable manner due to continuous and intensive management input, but stand A has more structural and compositional complexity than stand B. The shaded ellipse represented by C shows the envelope of possible conditions that any stand can have within a region if the stands are allowed to self-organize following some level of management (such as enrichment planting to introduce tree species with important functional traits and some commercial thinning or partial cutting to maintain an uneven-aged structure and even greater diversity of tree species with different functional traits). The variety of possible outcomes within envelope C allows forests and foresters to be “creative” in adapting to new altered conditions such as climate change. Note that the final envelope (dashed lines) covers a different spectrum of ecological characteristics than the initial conditions since future climatic conditions will be different (modified from Puettmann et al. 2009)