Integrating Wildlife into the Managed Forest

Integrating wildlife habitat concerns into multiple-use forest management requires four things: 1) the right attitude, 2) a process for systematic resource coordination, 3) models that relate forest conditions to wildlife outputs, and 4) the effective use of monitoring to support an adaptive management strategy. These four things reflect that resource managers must first want to make forestry-wildlife coordination work, that they need a mechanism for doing it, that they need habitat criteria for meeting wildlife goals, and that we only know enough at this time to get pointed in the right direction.Comprehensive goals for timber and wildlife are set early in successful forestry-wildlife integration. The goals provide for maintaining habitat and wildlife diversity while simultaneously producing consumable surpluses of timber and game in relation to demands for those products. Comprehensive inventories and vegetation growth and yield models are used to analyze the current management situation and show the need for actions to meet goals. The wildlife yield models are species-habitat relationships functions that relate habitat conditions to wildlife outputs by species. The management plan developed constitutes a coordinated set of resource objectives and the schedule of practices that will achieve them in an efficient way. Monitoring the effects of the practices is used to learn whether assumptions and models used in planning need to be revised, and whether the course of management needs to be adjusted to meet the goals. Key words: Forest management, Wildlife management, integration, Wildlife habitat, Multiple use planning.