Reduce impacts to soils and nutrient cycling

Maintaining both soil quality and nutrient cycling are already common principles of sustainable forest management and can help improve the capacity of ecosystems to persist and sustain productivity as environmental conditions change. In addition to maintaining ecosystem productivity, soils are important stores of carbon that are vulnerable to losses from site disturbance due to harvest, recreation, or other natural disturbance. Losses of soil carbon are often dependent on soil type, species composition, and soil carbon pool (e.g., forest floor, mineral soil), although soil carbon pools typically recover given enough time. Greater intensity of harvest removal or soil disturbance can result in greater soil carbon loss and long-term impacts on forest carbon stocks. Additionally, disturbance can cause physical and chemical changes to soils, including soil compaction, mixing of soil layers, erosion, and removal of organic layers. These impacts can significantly alter soil biotic communities with consequences for nutrient cycling, including the leaching or fixation of nutrients that can affect the ability of ecosystems to sequester carbon. Many existing guidelines for reducing impacts to soils and nutrient cycling are likely to be beneficial, either in their current form or with modifications, for maintaining existing carbon stocks and sequestration capacity with increasing forest stressors from climate change.

Many forestry practices work directly and indirectly to maintain the integrity of ecosystems in the face of climate change in order to sustain the functions those systems provide. These land management practices seek to preserve or improve soil nutrient cycling, hydrologic functioning, and vegetation characteristics, and wildlife and insect populations that support productive and healthy forests that store and continue to sequester carbon. This adaptation strategy seeks to sustain or enhance ecological functions to reduce the impacts of a changing climate on forest carbon stocks.