Achieving a broadly accepted approach to ecologically sustainable forest management will require improved scientific understanding of disturbance regimes and their consequences for ecosystem function and biodiversity.
Timber harvesting is the most controversial disturbance in forest ecosystems.
Recent ecological research focuses on the effect of timber harvesting on forest fragmentation at a landscape scale, and structural simplification due to factors such as the loss of woody debris at the stand level. A more complex scenario is described where natural agents of disturbance, such as fire and plant diseases, have had their assumed normal functioning disrupted and now have very different and potentially significant ecological consequences. The internationally agreed criteria and indicators of the Montreal Process provide a framework for incorporating an understanding of disturbance regimes into ecologically sustainable forest management. Long-term experiments, monitoring and adaptive management are required to better appreciate the ecological significance of past and present disturbance regimes on forest biodiversity and should be an integral part of approaches to ecologically sustainable forest management.