Special Section: The Ecological Effects of Salvage Logging after Natural Disturbance

Modern industrial societies are built on models of efficiency and neatness. Waste and messiness are seen as bad. And so it is with the industrial model of forestry, which appears to be widely accepted by many societies as an appropriate way to manage natural resources. Wildfires (especially those that are stand replacing), hurricanes, and other major disturbances are seen not as natural events and processes that generate biodiversity, but as catastrophes that destroy forests. They create messes that need to be cleaned up. If by cleaning up dead and dying trees after a disturbance, some money can be made from the timber, so much the better. This is the fundamental justification for postdisturbance (“salvage”) logging. Indeed, the word salvage implies saving something, in this case saving money that otherwise would be lost if burned wood is left to decay. Many people who oppose large-scale logging of natural forests voice no objection to salvage logging of these same forests after a fire. Somehow, these “damaged” forests are no longer natural, or at least no longer as pretty in the eyes of many people. This seems to be the general perception around much of the world, as the internationality of the papers in this special section makes clear. Natural resources agencies take advantage of the public’s lack of esthetic appreciation for disturbed vegetation and its limited understanding of the ecological role of natural disturbance. As conservation scientists, we know that natural disturbances at various spatial and temporal scales and intensities are fundamental to the generation and maintenance of biodiversity in ecosystems across the world (Connell 1978; Pickett & White 1985; Platt & Connell 2003). Beyond that, and less appreciated by the public and even many environmentalists, naturally disturbed, unsalvaged, early successional forests are often the most biologically diverse of all forest conditions and are both more rare and more imperiled than old-growth forest in many regions (Noss et al. 2006). In the first paper of the special section, we review the literature on impacts of postdisturbance logging worldwide. We point out that natural disturbances enhance ecological processes and biodiversity and can re-create some of the structural complexity and landscape heterogeneity of forests that were lost through past human management. Three general impacts of salvage logging are the alteration of stand structural complexity, changes in ecosystem pro-