Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Humans rely on healthy forests to supply energy, building materials, and food and to provide services such as storing carbon, hosting biodiversity, and regulating climate. Defining forest health integrates utilitarian and ecosystem measures of forest condition and function, implemented across a range of spatial scales. Although native forests are adapted to some level of disturbance, all forests now face novel stresses in the form of climate change, air pollution, and invasive pests. Detecting how intensification of these stresses will affect the trajectory of forests is a major scientific challenge that requires developing systems to assess the health of global forests. It is particularly critical to identify thresholds for rapid forest decline, because it can take many decades for forests to restore the services that they provide.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The boreal forest, one of the largest biomes on Earth, provides ecosystem services that benefit society at levels ranging from local to global. Currently, about two-thirds of the area covered by this biome is under some form of management, mostly for wood production. Services such as climate regulation are also provided by both the unmanaged and managed boreal forests. Although most of the boreal forests have retained the resilience to cope with current disturbances, projected environmental changes of unprecedented speed and amplitude pose a substantial threat to their health. Management options to reduce these threats are available and could be implemented, but economic incentives and a greater focus on the boreal biome in international fora are needed to support further adaptation and mitigation actions.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Although disturbances such as fire and native insects can contribute to natural dynamics of forest health, exceptional droughts, directly and in combination with other disturbance factors, are pushing some temperate forests beyond thresholds of sustainability. Interactions from increasing temperatures, drought, native insects and pathogens, and uncharacteristically severe wildfire are resulting in forest mortality beyond the levels of 20th-century experience. Additional anthropogenic stressors, such as atmospheric pollution and invasive species, further weaken trees in some regions. Although continuing climate change will likely drive many areas of temperate forest toward large-scale transformations, management actions can help ease transitions and minimize losses of socially valued ecosystem services.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Tropical forests house over half of Earth’s biodiversity and are an important influence on the climate system. These forests are experiencing escalating human influence, altering their health and the provision of important ecosystem functions and services. Impacts started with hunting and millennia-old megafaunal extinctions (phase I), continuing via low-intensity shifting cultivation (phase II), to today’s global integration, dominated by intensive permanent agriculture, industrial logging, and attendant fires and fragmentation (phase III). Such ongoing pressures, together with an intensification of global environmental change, may severely degrade forests in the future (phase IV, global simplification) unless new “development without destruction” pathways are established alongside climate change–resilient landscape designs.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Several key tree genera are used in planted forests worldwide, and these represent valuable global resources. Planted forests are increasingly threatened by insects and microbial pathogens, which are introduced accidentally and/or have adapted to new host trees. Globalization has hastened tree pest emergence, despite a growing awareness of the problem, improved understanding of the costs, and an increased focus on the importance of quarantine. To protect the value and potential of planted forests, innovative solutions and a better-coordinated global approach are needed. Mitigation strategies that are effective only in wealthy countries fail to contain invasions elsewhere in the world, ultimately leading to global impacts. Solutions to forest pest problems in the future should mainly focus on integrating management approaches globally, rather than single-country strategies. A global strategy to manage pest issues is vitally important and urgently needed.</jats:p>