Simulating the impact of landscape-level biodiversity guidelines: A case study

British Columbia, along with most of the rest of North America, is becoming preoccupied with emulating natural landscape patterns under the auspices o f ecosystem management. With their Biodiversity Guidebook, BC developed one of the first collections of rules for landscape management purposes. The l andscape-level rules developed therein are representative of those being de veloped in other areas of North America. This research, compared, in simula tion, a range of patterns created by these guidelines for a landscape in ce ntral BC, against those created from the historical 60 hectare two-pass sys tem, and a "natural" disturbance regime. Results indicate that the biodiver sity guidelines created more natural levels of patch sizes, interior forest area, and seral stage percentages compared to the two-pass system. However , the guidelines failed to create more natural rates of disturbance, or ran ges of patch sizes and interior areas in old and mature forest. Furthermore , the implied degree of naturalness of the low, medium, and high biodiversi ty options did not necessarily hold true. The simulation results presented in this paper show that the concept of mimicry involves much more than orig inally had been supposed, and that there are limits to the degree to which mimicry can be used as a landscape management paradigm with our current kno wledge and ability. A strategy for working towards a natural landscape patt ern program for forest management is discussed.