Linking tropical silviculture to sustainable forest management

Since the term "sustainability" appeared in the last decades of the twentieth century, ecological, technological and socioeconomic aspects have been the main pillars of sustainable forest management (SFM). While timber production and NWFPs were the dominant aims of forest management in the past, demand increasingly includes the provision of environmental services. However, most silvicultural systems in the tropics were designed many decades ago with a strong focus on timber production. This paper discusses six steps to bridge the gap between classic tropical silviculture geared to timber production and more comprehensive approaches for sustainability in forest management. This is of particular importance in the tropics, where timber production is faced with alarming rates of deforestation and the increasing importance of forests for subsistence needs. Since forest expansion is in strong competition with other land use aims, intensification to increase timber output per unit area is a promising approach to overcome this major problem, for example through short-rotation forestry, species domestication, site improvement, and other measures. Diversifying forest structures and services is important as an additional strategy to mitigate possible environmental damage and shortages in the provision of other goods and services, and therefore to contribute to sustainable management at the landscape level. Scales of management, both temporal and spatial, therefore have to be adapted to the needs of individual land owners (e.g. for timber production) as well as to the collective needs of societies (e.g. water, biodiversity, carbon sequestration). Sustainable forest management is very dependent on acceptance by all stakeholders involved. Participatory approaches can contribute significantly to sustainability in this context. This article illustrates how the integration of silviculture and forest management, including all the aspects mentioned above, can counteract the frequently applied "timber mining" approach and lead to a modern approach to silviculture in terms of adaptive ecosystem management. Social empowerment, and functional market mechanisms for products and services beyond timber are essential components of modern silvicultural planning, but they are of no use to SFM if they are not accompanied by a sound understanding of ecological functions and processes and the impacts of human interventions. Tropical silviculture and SFM depend on ecological knowledge and on its practical implementation in the field.