Plant demography, land-use history, and the commercial use of forests

Recently, a paper describing the long-term floristic effects of forest cutting in the southern Appalachians (Duffy & Meier 1992) appeared in this journal followed by a firestorm of criticism. The volume and venom of criticism surprised me because the paper's findings are not very exceptional; similar historical effects have been reported for a variety of European and American forest communities (e.g., Oosting & Humphreys 1940; Rackham 1975; Peterken & Game 1984; Whitney & Foster 1988; Dzwonko & Loster 1989; and others). In general, second growth woodlands tend to be impoverished in forest interior species relative to old growth stands on comparable sites, an effect that may last decades or even centuries after site abandonment. Impoverishment has been best documented in herbaceous plant species, but similar effects probably occur in many taxa (Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team 1993). Examples of long-lived historical effects in forest floras are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently diverse that the existence of such effects should be beyond debate. Indeed, the impact of historical land use is so obvious that any observant person who visits the eastern deciduous forest will be aware of it. Unfortunately, simple correlations of stand history and species composition do not suggest useful strategies for forest management. Effective management requires a finer understanding of how individual forest species live in the forest environment. In particular it requires a careful demographic description of forest populations in the context of natural and human-mediated disturbance. As