ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how silviculture influences this blending of people's needs and environmental values, with a focus on non-commodity values. It discusses the attributes of forest stands that influence forest amenity values, the effects of timber-production silviculture on amenity values, and the incorporation of knowledge about those effects into silvicultural prescriptions. Advocates of ecosystem management argue that traditional practices should be augmented and/or replaced with non-traditional silviculture based on new scientific findings about natural disturbance patterns. Scenic impacts are only part of silviculture's effect on human behaviors in forests. However, forestry attitudes are also influenced by a person's beliefs about the biological impacts of silviculture or about the motives of foresters and forest owners. The findings described in this chapter underscore the need for forest managers and policy-makers to consider the human dimensions of silviculture. And finally they need to understand that no human dimension of silviculture exists apart from any other.
