Paul Hessburg, Research Landscape Ecologist, USDA-Forest Service, phessburg@fs.fed.us

Context: More than a century of forest and fire management of Inland Pacific landscapes has transformed their successional and disturbance dynamics. Regional connectivity of many terrestrial and aquatic habitats is fragmented, flows of some ecological and physical processes have been altered in space and time, and the frequency, size and intensity of many disturbances that configure these habitats have been altered. Current efforts to address these impacts yield a small footprint in comparison to wildfires and insect outbreaks. Moreover, many current projects emphasize thinning and fuels reduction within individual forest stands, while overlooking large-scale habitat connectivity and disturbance flow issues.
Methods: We provide a framework for landscape restoration, offering seven principles. We discuss their implication for management, and illustrate their application with examples.
Results: Historical forests were spatially heterogeneous at multiple scales. Heterogeneity was the result of variability and interactions among native ecological patterns and processes, including successional and disturbance processes regulated by climatic and topographic drivers. Native flora and fauna were adapted to these conditions, which conferred a measure of resilience to variability in climate and recurrent contagious disturbances.
Conclusions: To restore key characteristics of this resilience to current landscapes, planning and management are needed at ecoregion, local landscape, successional patch, and tree neighborhood scales.Restoration that works effectively across ownerships and allocations will require active thinking about landscapes as socio-ecological systems that provide services to people within the finite capacities of ecosystems. We focus attention on landscape-level prescriptions as foundational to restoration planning and execution.

Dr. Hessburg is a research landscape ecologist with the USDA-Forest Service, PNW Research Station. He is stationed in Wenatchee, WA, where he has lived and worked for the last 25 years. Paul is also a Professor (Affiliate) at the UW, WSU, and UI, where he has collaborative research projects with faculty and students. His areas of research interest are the landscape and disturbance ecology of historical, contemporary, and future western US forests, natural wildfire resilience mechanisms of western forests, and landscape restoration in coupled human-natural systems. He has 37 years of professional forestry experience in the West, has authored and co-authored more than 165 research articles and book chapters, including a recently released Springer title on decision support modeling entitled “Making Transparent Environmental Management Decisions”.

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