Forest Sustainability along Rural Urban Interfaces

"Forest sustainability can mean many things to many people, but at its core it has to do with managing changes in forested landscapes to provide a desired flow of benefits over the long run. In many parts of the United States, including the Southeast, the great challenges to sustaining forests have shifted over the past twenty five years, away from rural timber management issues and toward the issues raised by exurban population growth and the evolving footprint of human settlement and occupation. Our focus on a rural-urban interface suggests new patterns of development that are neither essentially urban nor essentially rural but define an intersection of social systems and ecosystems. In this interface, the “human world” and the “natural world” overlap at increasingly broad scales and challenge our ability to fashion a workable coexistence—i.e., a sustainable future. The interactions between people and nature are bi-directional and complex and the resulting feedbacks can lead to a cascade of effects that change the quality of the human experience and the flow of ecosystem services. An understanding of how human systems and ecosystems interact is the necessary foundation for finding a sustainable trajectory of change. Solutions demand innovative interdisciplinary research programs focused on understanding and forecasting the human-ecosystem template and the flow of ecosystem services at meaningful scales, and developing institutions and tools for planning, policy, and management designed for the landscapes of the 21st century." [Abstract from Conference Program and Book of Abstracts]

[Keynote Address]

[Presented at "Emerging Issues Along Urban/Rural Interfaces: Linking Science and Society", a conference held March 13-16, 2005 in Atlanta, GA (US)]