Quantifying floristic and structural forest maturity: an attribute-based method for wet eucalypt forests

1. Maintaining developmental heterogeneity of ecological communities within landscapes is crucial for sustainable native forest management. Consequently, methods to assess forest maturity (i.e. the degree to which the forest contains attributes and supports processes characteristic of late-successional forests) are valuable for making management decisions. However, no consistent, pragmatic method to quantify maturity that incorporates multiple ecosystem elements is available for many forest systems, including Australian wet eucalypt forests. 2. We draw upon forest community dynamics theory to develop a method to quantify maturity based on forest attributes, and use this method to create two metrics of wet eucalypt forest floristic and structural maturity. We then test the ability of remotely-sensed and field-collected variables to predict these metrics.
3. Both the floristic and structural maturity metrics performed well at capturing underlying trends of forest maturation. Remotely-sen...