Forestwide

Forestwide, or forest-wide, is a term used in forestry to describe actions, policies, or assessments that are applied across an entire forest area rather than being limited to individual stands or patches. The term emphasizes a holistic approach to planning and management, integrating objectives such as timber production, biodiversity conservation, water protection, and wildfire risk reduction across the whole forest.

Common forestwide activities include forest-wide inventory and monitoring, harvest planning and silvicultural treatments conducted across multiple stands, fire management planning for the entire forest, road network and access planning, and conservation measures that aim to maintain landscape connectivity. Data management and governance require standardized protocols to ensure consistency.

Forestwide planning contrasts with stand-level approaches that tailor actions to a single stand's conditions. While forestwide strategies provide coherence and scale, they must accommodate variable site conditions, stand structure, and stakeholder interests.

In practice, implementing forestwide approaches requires coordination among agencies, data integration, and often larger inventories. It can improve resilience by addressing ecosystem processes at scale but may face challenges including heterogeneity, administrative complexity, and resource constraints.

Related concepts include forest management, landscape-scale planning, and sustainable forestry.