INTRODUCTION

The TRIAD forest management concept involves designating forest reserves and intensively managed areas within a landscape matrix managed by silvicultural systems derived from principles of ecological forestry (Seymour and Hunter 1999). By increasing timber yields per hectare in a strategically chosen zone, many fewer hectares are needed to produce the same forest-wide harvest, thus enhancing managers' ability to address other values such as biodiversity on the remaining areas (Sedjo and Botkin 1997). Introduced by Seymour and Hunter (1992), the concept can be traced to earlier work of Clawson (1974, 1977), Seymour and McCormack (1989), and Gladstone and Ledig (1990). Contemporary examples include grassland and aquatic ecosystems (Hunter and Calhoun 1996), an organizing framework for silvicultural research and management in the Great Lakes region (Palik et al. 2004), an illustration of “biodiversity exchanges” (Brown et al. 2006), and an analysis of public forest land in west Australia (Stoneman 2007). Indeed, many authors (e.g. Binkley 1997; Sahajananthan et al. 1998; Messier and Kneeshaw 1999; Taylor 1999) have explored the single-use zoning concept under various naming conventions.

The early 1990s was a tumultuous time in North American forestry, as influential ecologists began to question publicly the agricultural and “manage-everywhere” paradigms of traditional sustained yield forestry and outlined an alternative “New Forestry” (Franklin 1989; Gillis 1990), a concept that quickly morphed into ecosystem management as it was embraced by the USDA Forest Service (Salwasser 1994).