ABSTRACT
Implementation, effectiveness and validation monitoring perform complementary and re-enforcing roles in guiding the development of more ecologically responsible approaches to forest management.
Selecting different indicators for monitoring based not on individually applied criteria, but on their functional relationship to each other helps to clarify their complementary and inter dependent roles, and is vital in enabling monitoring to engage with the AM process.
Species-based indicators do not provide reliable measurements for assessing compliance against performance standards because of inherent difficulties in establishing clear links between management impacts and changes in biodiversity.
By contrast, indicators of forest structure (and both stand and landscape scales) do provide reliable measurements of management performance because they exhibit direct and tractable responses to changes in human activity.
Ultimately, the goal of validation monitoring is to improve our understanding of the processes that link changes in management to changes in biodiversity via intermediate changes in the structure and function of the forest. The primary role of biological indicators and target species is therefore not to act as direct indicators of performance but as evaluators of the performance indicators that define forest management standards. This process of validation is often missing from monitoring yet it is the only way of linking changing management practices with actual conservation goals.
