North Central Research Station

Spectrum model of landscape management matrix. The large open box within a portion of the spectrum represents the need to consider a landscape perspective which integrates varying land use and conditions.

Increasingly, society is demanding that forest landscapes sustain the production of many different types of goods and services, including timber, biodiversity, recreation opportunities, and aesthetics, among many others. Ensuring sustainability of these goods and services is difficult, however, unless we can evaluate how large forest landscapes respond to the types of forest management and natural ecological processes that shape our forests. Because of the complexity and size of forest landscapes, we rely of computerized forest dynamics simulation models to evaluation the cumulative effects of forest management, and to design new forest management strategies that will more effectively or efficiently produce the goods and services we expect from our forests. (Click here to view text description and higher resolution version of figure .)