Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result. For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a series of studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself. Combining this new science with newly minted environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate conservation imperatives as well as the logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort involved years of controversy and debate, federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States. It led to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the primary goal of federal forestry toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests. Scientists went from spectators to planners and guides, employing their latest scientific findings and expertise to create a forest plan for 20 million acres that would satisfy the courts. The largest upheaval in federal forest management in history had occurred, along with a precipitous decline in timber harvest, and there was no going back. In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates personal reflections from the authors, short commentaries and histories from key figures— including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the Plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the Plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.

While most efforts at biodiversity conservation have focused primarily on protected areas and reserves, the unprotected lands surrounding those areas-the "matrix"-are equally important to preserving global biodiversity & maintaining forest health. In Conserving Forest Biodiversity, leading forest scientists David B. Lindenmayer and Jerry F. Franklin argue that the conservation of forest biodiversity requires a comprehensive and multiscaled approach that includes both reserve and nonreserve areas. They lay the foundations for such a strategy, bringing together the latestscientific information on landscape ecology, forestry, conservation biology, and related disciplines as they examine: the importance of the matrix in key areas of ecology such as metapopulation dynamics, habitat fragmentation, and landscape connectivity, general principles for matrix management, using natural disturbance regimes to guide human disturbance, landscape-level and stand-level elements of matrix management, the role of adaptive management and monitoring, social dimensions and tensions in implementing matrix-based forest management

In addition, they present five case studies that illustrate aspects and elements of applied matrix management in forests. The case studies cover a wide variety of conservation planning and management issues from North America, South America, and Australia, ranging from relatively intact forest ecosystems to an intensively managed plantation.

Conserving Forest Biodiversity presents strategies for enhancing matrix management that can play a vital role in the development of more effectiveapproaches to maintaining forest biodiversity. It examines the key issues and gives practical guidelines for sustained forest management, highlighting the critical role of the matrix for scientists, managers, decisionmakers, and other stakeholders involved in efforts to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem processes in forest landscapes.