Managing forests sustainably is a complex business. It requires a mindset of forest care while seeking to provide goods and services for present and future generations. It involves optimising the provision of community benefits of wood and non-wood products, of nature conservation, of ecosystem services such as clean air and water, as well as other community needs including spiritual, aesthetic and recreational experiences. It requires a broad skills base and information gathered over time so that trends and infrequent but potentially catastrophic events can be allowed for and incorporated into the management cycle.

The manager needs input from the public, the policy arena, other managers and planners, social sciences and economics as well as from a multitude of scientific fields. While many of the inputs needed are necessarily driven by the immediacy of current issues and political debate, management of forests requires long-term commitment. Forests are not static and so management ultimately must cater for their growth and change over time. In the case of wet eucalypt forests, the dominant trees are dependent on disturbance for their regeneration and can reach ages of 400 years or more before they die. Thus managers need to plan and manage over very long time-frames if the range of ages and successional stages are to be maintained in the landscape so that forests retain their biological diversity. Even trees managed in native forest for wood production attain ages of 80–100 years before they are cut. The trees also require a long-term commitment to management if the harvest is to be realised in the face of broadscale disturbances such as wildfire or from more insidious pest, disease and weed outbreaks.

The policy also recognised that research and monitoring are needed to support proper and effective adaptive forest management.

Tasmania has more forest, as a proportion of its total area, than any other State in Australia. Thirty-nine per cent of its forest area is reserved for nature conservation purposes. It also has a major timber industry based on native forest outside reserves, and plantations of eucalypt and pine on public and private land. Both wood production and conservation in dynamic forest ecosystems require active management with a sound ecological basis. While in the short term, conservation management may adopt the ‘benign neglect’ approach, production forestry can only effectively monitor the effects of particular silvicultural systems and forest management practices when the ecology of the major forest types in which it operates is understood.

Much of this research and monitoring can be done over relatively short time-frames, and proper monitoring schemes can assist in ensuring that we learn from mistakes and adapt practices to ensure that mistakes are not repeated. However, a much greater level of understanding about the variability of forests and impacts of differing management regimes can come from having a multi-disciplinary, longterm, site-based approach so that different specialists can bring their skills and understanding to bear on a common goal. It is also apparent that the scale of impacts differs greatly both in time and in space. Thus, around the world, there is a network of long-term ecological research (LTER) sites using this approach to research that incorporates a range of scales, from the molecule to the landscape and from the second to the century.

While much planning and decision-making is undertaken in the absence of long-term data, LTER sites can be used judiciously to underpin the decision-making process. As noted above, the longevity of forests extends over the lifetimes of many parliamentary election periods, even for the shortest plantation rotation. Therefore we need to be conscious of the idiosyncrasies that may arise from short-term data, and need to be especially cautious of applying such data where there are long-term implications.

A long-term ecological research (LTER) site was established at Warra in the Southern Forests of Tasmania in 1995. It is linked to the existing networks of national and international LTER sites. Warra provides:

These attributes can be used to capitalise on short funding cycles and can feed in to a longer term framework. Data can also be made readily available to other researchers who are involved in more theoretical studies and who may never even visit the site. However, they can make comparisons across the country, and around the world with contemporary data or with data that may have been collected before they were born.

The publication referred to below (Brown et al., 2001), of which this summary is the introduction, provides a brief description of the Warra LTER Site; its resources and facilities; its management; the research programs currently in place there; the results achieved to date and the direction of future research.

Neyland, M.G., Brown, M.J. & Su, W. (2000). Assessing the representativeness of long term ecological research (LTER) sites: a case study at Warra in Tasmania. Australian Forestry 63: 194-198.