Dealing with non-linearity and uncertainty in forest management

Forest managers today are struggling with the great uncertainties and rapid changes in many biophysical and socioeconomic aspects of their work. We argue in this review that viewing forests and forest management as complex adaptive systems and acknowledging non-linearity and uncertainty in forest dynamics and management provide an alternative for both production- and conservation-oriented forests to the traditional command and control approaches that have been advocated so far in forestry.We first discuss the concepts of nonlinearity and uncertainty in forest dynamics and management. We then propose a set of broad principles and approaches that are required for forest managers to better incorporate these new concepts into practices. These span from (1) relaxing and expanding the sustained-yield and single-good paradigm, (2) moving the target for assessing success in silviculture from predetermined strict outcomes for each and every stand to an envelope of possible outcomes that are acceptable for one or multiple stands, and (3) using approaches and modeling tools to assess as large a range of possible outcomes as possible instead of the traditional mainly deterministic and static modeling tools.