Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Great Lakes Forestry Centre, 1219 Queen St. East, Sault Ste. Marie, ON P6A 2E5, Canada.
School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Sep 1;317:115277. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.115277. Epub 2022 Jun 12.
This paper reviews trends in the academic literature on cumulative effects assessment (CEA) of disturbance on forest ecosystems to advance research in the broader context of impact assessments. Disturbance is any distinct spatiotemporal event that disrupts the structure and composition of an ecosystem affecting resource availability. We developed a Python package to automate search term selection, write search strategies, reduce bias and improve the efficient and effective selection of articles from academic databases and grey literature. We identified 148 peer-reviewed literature published between 1986 and 2022 and conducted an inductive and deductive thematic analysis of the results. Our findings revealed that CEA studies are concentrated in the global north, with most publications from authors affiliated with government agencies in the USA and Canada. Methodological and analytical approaches are less interdisciplinary but mainly quantitative and expert-driven, involving modeling the impacts of disturbances on biophysical valued components. Furthermore, the assessment of socioeconomic valued components, including the effects of disturbance on Indigenous wellbeing connected to forests, has received less attention. Even though there is a high preference for regional assessment, challenges with data access, quality, and analysis, especially baseline data over long periods, are hampering effective CEA. Few articles examined CEA - policy/management nexus. Of the few studies, challenges such as the inadequate implementation of CEA mitigation strategies due to policy drawbacks and resource constraints, the high cost of monitoring multiple indicators, and poor connections between scenarios/modeling and management actions were paramount. Future CEA research is needed to broaden our understanding of how multiple disturbance affects forests in the global south and coupled social and ecological systems and their implications for sustainable forest management.
本文回顾了关于干扰对森林生态系统累积影响评估（CEA）的学术文献趋势，以期在更广泛的影响评估背景下推进研究。干扰是指任何破坏生态系统结构和组成、影响资源可利用性的独特时空事件。我们开发了一个 Python 包，用于自动选择搜索词、编写搜索策略、减少偏差，并从学术数据库和灰色文献中有效选择文章。我们确定了 1986 年至 2022 年间发表的 148 篇同行评议文献，并对结果进行了归纳和演绎主题分析。我们的研究结果表明，CEA 研究集中在北半球，大多数出版物来自美国和加拿大政府机构的作者。方法和分析方法的跨学科性较低，但主要是定量和专家驱动的，涉及模拟干扰对生物物理有价值组成部分的影响。此外，对社会经济有价值组成部分的评估，包括干扰对与森林有关的土著福祉的影响，受到的关注较少。尽管人们强烈倾向于进行区域评估，但数据获取、质量和分析方面的挑战，特别是长期的基线数据，正在阻碍有效的 CEA。很少有文章研究 CEA-政策/管理关系。在为数不多的研究中，由于政策缺陷和资源限制导致 CEA 缓解策略执行不足、监测多个指标的成本高以及情景/建模与管理行动之间的联系不佳等挑战至关重要。需要开展未来的 CEA 研究，以扩大我们对多种干扰如何影响全球南方森林以及耦合的社会和生态系统的理解，并了解其对可持续森林管理的影响。
