Towards better practices of salvage logging for reducing the ecosystem impacts in Mediterranean burned forests

An average of 213,000 ha of European forest is affected by fire every year, with 90% of this area corresponding to Mediterranean countries. The timber of the burned forests is usually harvested by clearcutting over large areas to be used mainly as bioenergy. Recent scientific evidence has shown the strong impact that these salvage logging practices have on the ecosystem. However, forest owners and companies largely ignore academic debate, and salvage logging decisions are usually taken for economic, practical and emotional reasons. We propose a process to connect scientists and practitioners with the aim of providing evidence-based guidelines to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services, which can be used as a general model. The process involves five steps: (1) to review the available scientific knowledge on post-fire forest management; (2) to synthesize the information to produce a handbook of best practices in Mediterranean burned forests; (3) to provide a tool to help decision-making in post-fire management; (4) to actively disseminate this knowledge to the forest sector; and (5) to fill knowledge gaps with new experimental studies aimed to assess the environmental impact of some of the most feasible management alternatives. The feedback of the forest sector has been obtained along the process, and recommendations for better practices are already being promoted among forest owners by the administration. We suggest that similar processes can be conducted in other socio-environmental contexts to improve the management of disturbed forests and to generalize our knowledge on the topic.