Rethinking Northern Hardwood Forest Management Paradigms With Silvicultural Systems Research: Research-Management Partnerships Ensure Relevance And Application

Well-designed, robust partnerships are important for addressing forest resource problems that intersect diverse ownerships, management, and research expertise. Here, we describe a case study of a research-management partnership. First, we describe the rationale and design of a large-scale, long-term experiment focused on increasing the sustainability and resilience of managed northern hardwoods. With the experiment as context, we next discuss details of the partnership contributing to its success, as well as some challenges. The experiment is a Michigan-wide evaluation of silvicultural alternatives to the current paradigm of selection silviculture. Our goal is to identify combinations of silvicultural treatments that increase the diversity and density of sapling recruits over forested landscapes where deer-browsing pressure and other limiting factors are at play. Pretreatment data from our 140-site study bolstered justification for the research, with sapling and pole classes generally lacking adequate stocking and diversity of desirable species over large geographic extents. We anticipate that the wildlife and forestry research-management model used to develop this project will be useful for other rapidly developing challenges that cannot wait decades to be addressed without potentially catastrophic losses to forest function. Key beneficial elements of our partnership include: ( 1) sensitivity to information needs at all management levels (i.e., policy to practice), (2) capitalizing on differences in strengths and reward systems of managers and scientists, (3) structured, frequent scientist-manager meetings to maintain focus on research and management application outcomes, (4) long-term relations and support that build trust, and (5) explicit wildlife and forestry collaboration on problems requiring joint expertise. Challenges to our partnership generally revolved around communication, workload, and implementation issues, and were partially alleviated by planning.