Towards the "resilience thinking": the effects of forest management on ecosystem services provision

Over the last decades, human-induced effects on Earth systems increasingly undermined the availability of natural capital stocks and flows. Climate change effects, land use and cover transformations, and unsustainable management practices strongly reduced the resilience, resistance, and stability of ecosystems, through compromising biodiversity conservation and services provision. In particular, forest resources faced increasing external disturbances, stresses and impacts, thus reducing their capacity to continuously provide benefits to local communities. In order to face these substantial changes, forest management is now called to improve ecosystem resilience, mainly through implementing adaptive strategies and more sustainable practices. The aim of research is twofold: (i) to assess the effects of management strategies and practices on forest ecosystem resilience, particularly by analyzing and describing the impact of alternative management approaches on biodiversity conservation and services provision; and (ii) to provide insights on how to improve forest ecosystem resilience through implementing the †œresilience thinking†� in practical forest management. By providing the results from specific case studies, the research develops throughout the following steps: (i) describing how forest management approached the concepts of sustainability and resilience over the last decades, from global to local scale; (ii) reviewing the main economic and ecological foundations in assessing forest ecosystem services; (iii) giving a picture of some recent approaches for mapping and quantifying forest ecosystem services, including the use of different indicators; (iv) reporting the main effects of forest management on ecosystem services provision both at landscape and stand scale; and (v) delineating useful guidelines to implement the †œresilience thinking†� in forest management. Although the effects from other disturbances (i.e. climate and land use changes) are not treated here, the main research findings may give a substantial contribution to deeper understand the role of forest management in improving forest ecosystem resilience, as well as to better orient adaptive strategies from stand to landscape scale towards ensuring both forest health and vitality and benefits to local communities in the future.