ABSTRACT
Bring eleven internationally reknowned forest ecologists together with some experts on complexity, lock them for three days in a peaceful countryside environment and challenge them to consider a new conceptual framework as a way to think about their field and their forests, then watch the results unfold over two years. This is what this book is offering you: a new way of thinking about forests and forest managements all around the world. From the unregulated forestry of Borneo to the highly regulated forest management of Finland, from the seemingly depauperate life of the boreal forest of Canada to the challengingly diverse forests of the Amazon, or through the incredibly human-manipulated Mediterranean forests, this book takes you on a journey of rediscovering the forest and how we could better manage it through the lens of complexity science. We all know that forests are ‘complex’ (in the ordinary sense of the word, meaning complicated, variable, diverse and heterogenous). This book and its various authors are attempting to demonstrate that this ‘complexity’ could be made to work for us instead of against us; that complexity (in the sense of complexity science) does not necessarily equate with our ordinary use of the word ‘complex’; that not every aspect of complexity science has to be complicated; and that forest managers and conservationists need to reconsider their emphasis on stability and predictability to allow the forest to adapt to – and self-organize for – the new conditions which we are creating through our actions.
