Resistance and elasticity: promising concepts for the management of protection forests in the European Alps

Many mountain forests in the European Alps protect people and assets agains t natural hazards such as snow avalanches. These forests are mainly managed to ensure continuous and effective protection. Silvicultural operations sh ould make protection forests as resistant as possible to natural disturbing agents such as wind that have the potential to impair effective protection , and they should increase their elasticity, i.e. speed of recovery once di sturbances have impaired the protective effect. However, current management approaches do not yet consistently focus on enhancing resistance and elast icity in the face of multiple disturbances. Moreover, they use a stand leve l approach instead of an ecosystem-based approach. These shortcomings can b e overcome by explicitly integrating resistance and elasticity into forest management. In this paper, the meaning of resistance and elasticity is clar ified and illustrated with examples. A procedure to integrate resistance an d elasticity into forest management is presented, with the five steps: Iden tification of disturbances and slow undesirable changes, identification of characteristics relevant to the resistance and elasticity of a forest to di sturbances, identification of variables for monitoring these characteristic s, establishment of target values for each variable, and implementation inc luding monitoring. Suggestions to quantify resistance and elasticity are ma de. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.