Coping with uncertainty in forest wildlife planning

Abstract

Forest planning rarely incorporates uncertainty about the incidence of disturbance and how ecosystems respond to disturbance. This omission may bias perceptions about the impact of disturbance. Human impacts, such as timber harvesting, are often deterministic, with disturbance occurring at prescribed intervals, at a single spatial scale, and at a single intensity. Such deterministic processes are likely to have very different impacts from natural stochastic processes that operate at random over a range of spatial and temporal scales. It is insufficient to describe disturbance in terms of mean values such as frequency, because variation around the mean is important for determining the impact ..