What Should We Sustain?

摘要

It's not easy to define ecologically sustainable levels of forest biomass harvesting. For the past several years, I've been working on defining sustainable levels of forest biomass harvesting that can be used as guidelines for decision making. As a forest soil scientist in a team of mainly soil researchers, I tend to look at sustainability in terms of soil characteristics such as carbon and nutrient content, acidity, and organic matter quality. In my world, we tend to think that if the soils are kept happy, then the whole ecosystem will be happy and function contentedly.