Establish reserves to maintain ecosystem diversity

EASTERN: Some areas with exemplary combinations of soil, hydrologic, and climatic variation support a correspondingly high degree of species diversity. Ecosystems in the areas may be protected through the establishment of reserves. Reserves are traditionally defined as natural areas with little to no harvest activity that do not exclude fire management or other natural disturbance processes. However, the use and definition of reserves may need to be evaluated within the context of changing climate and forest response. It may be valuable to retain explicit flexibility in management practices, so long as management directly supports the justifications and goals for establishing the reserve. This approach may also be used as a “control” for monitoring adaptation actions implemented in other forest stands. 

WESTERN: Some areas with exemplary combinations of soil, hydrologic, and climatic variation support a correspondingly high degree of species diversity. Such ecosystems may be protected through the establishment of reserves in order to sustain the ecological elements contained therein. Reserves are traditionally defined as natural areas with little to no harvest activity, but do not exclude fires burning within the natural range of variation or other natural disturbance processes. However, the use and definition of reserves may need to be evaluated within the context of changing climate and forest response. It may be valuable to retain explicit flexibility in management practices, so long as management directly supports the justifications and goals for establishing the reserve. This approach may also be used as a “control” for monitoring adaptation actions implemented in other forest stands.

Land managers already work to increase structural and species diversity in many cases, and as an adaptation strategy this general goal receives added effort and focus. Structural and species diversity may buffer a community against the susceptibility of its individual components to climate change. In other words, a community may still experience stress as individual components fare poorly, but the redundancy of particular roles and variability among all species’ responses contribute to the resilience of the community. Although a forest is often defined by its dominant or most abundant species, even rare species can act as keystone species or contribute to the suppression of invasive exotic plants.