Sustainable Soil Productivity—A Look Back and the Look Ahead.

During the past 40+ years, from the perspective of a forest industry (production forestry) scientist, we progressed through three overlapping periods that placed increasing emphasis on sustaining the productivity capacity of our primary forest resource—forest soil.  The first period stressed characterizing (inventorying) the soil resource and understanding soil-plant relationship and the base productivity capacity by soil/landform and vegetation type.  Emphasis was then placed on minimizing detrimental soil disturbance, correcting growth-limiting factors for the crop species (where practical) and enhancing productivity.  Today our main focus is on sustaining the long-term productivity potential of the soil/forest resource while at the same time protecting associated resources including water, biodiversity, and environmental health.  Each era added to the strategic database that supported more advanced assessment and decision support tools within a reliable process framework. Examples will be presented of long-term site productivity study findings and decision-support tools from each period that helped managers prescribe best management practices aimed at maintaining and enhancing the productivity capacity of the soil resource.   For example, remote sensing technologies combined with geospatial tools are essential to meet today’s resource assessment and monitoring challenges and best management practice prescription needs. Challenges ahead include maintaining biodiversity, supplies of clean water, soil quality and a favorable carbon footprint while increasing forest biomass utilization for wood products and bio-energy fuels under changing land use, climatic patterns, and fire-risk conditions.