Influencing Natural Forest Disturbance through Timber Harvesting: Tradeoffs among Disturbance Processes, Forest Values, and Timber Condition

Governments provide technical, political, and financial incentives to encourage timber harvesting for the purpose of mitigating natural forest disturbance. To provide guidance concerning these incentives, this paper integrates a natural disturbance regime into a dynamic model of forest management. The model is used to estimate live and salvage timber harvest subsidies needed to incorporate disturbance-mitigating benefits before and after three types of natural disturbance: insect outbreak, storm, and wildfire. While not specific to a particular country or state, results indicate that the degree of forest mortality may be a poor metric for gauging management response due to various degrees of endogeneity across different types of disturbance events. The live timber harvesting subsidy is substantial but quickly declines after a disturbance event. In contrast, salvage subsidies increase following a disturbance event but remain modest.