Alternative Silvicultural Systems Maintain Multiple Values in Tall Eucalypt Forest

Abstract

Accelerating the development of more heterogeneous forest structures is an important goal of many contemporary forest management regimes. However, long-term silvicultural experiments that compare different approaches to generating structural complexity are rare. We took advantage of a replicated silvicultural experiment that was established in mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests in southeastern Australia in the late 1980s. We evaluated multi-decadal forest development responses to seven different silvicultural treatments: clearfelling (clearcutting), seed tree, three gap sizes (0.25, 0.5, and 2 ha), and two levels of overstorey retention (30% and 50%), plus unharvested controls. We com..