Ecological Modeling for Informing Forest Restoration and Management

Copyright: © 2013 Xi W. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Forest restoration planning, evaluation, management and implementation are major and urgent challenges for forest health and sustainable development in the United States and many other regions of the world [1]. Forest managers, stakeholders and private landowners need to use all possible means to assist in this important undertaking. The use of ecological models to assess restoration strategies and their possible outcomes provides forest professionals, with a temporal and spatial forecasting tool to assess change in forests affected by a variety of environmental threats, including insects, pathogens, wildfire, hurricanes and invasive species.