Sustainibility and Long-term Dynamics of Forests: Methods and Metrics for Detection of Convergence and Stationarity

Sustainability has several definitions within natural resource economics. Sustainable states may be economically or biologically determined. Age and age classes add complexity to any definition of forest sustainability. Here we focus on selected metrics that might be used to define forest sustainability, convergence to sustainable state, and methods that allow convergence detection and classification of forest dynamics. In a deterministic world sustainable states of forests may be cyclic or fixed. If random perturbations are included, sustainability is associated with convergence of distribution parameters. Pattern recognition procedures are presented that detect whether a forest converges to a cyclic, a fixed or stationary state and whether convergence is fast, slow or cannot be observed within the time horizon considered.