We can get wood in many different ways, but generally these can be grouped into two broad categories that (imperfectly) capture logging dynamics from boreal and temperate woodlands to tropical rainforests. These are either (1) more-intensive and (2) more-extensive harvests.

More-intensive harvests range from different timber plantation systems to silvicultural approaches within native forest systems that prioritise higher yields – sometimes using additional inputs like herbicides or thinning of competing vegetation. More-extensive harvests are ‘softer’, including various reduced-impact or ‘ecological’ harvesting techniques that minimise damage per unit area, but often at the cost of lower wood yields.

With rising timber demands, how much forest is intensively or extensively managed then has major implications for how much forest can remain entirely unharvested – or at least managed for purposes other than for timber.

A major focus of my academic career to date has been to understand at landscape-to-regional scales which combinations of more-intensive, more-extensive and unhharvested forest best navigate trade-offs between competing objectives – so, between wood production, biodiversity, climate mitgation, financial outcomes, and more.

My research on this topic spans the lowland dipterocarp rainforests of Borneo to the temperate Douglas-fir dominated temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.

Over the past two years, I have been leading a project working with a network of collaborators wordlwide to understand if there are globally consistent generalities in which combinations of production systems best navigate trade-offs; or whether answers vary in parts of the world with very different forestry systems and ecological histories.