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Introduction
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Ecology-economic optimisation is a key problem of modern forestry. It assumes the balanced utilisation of diverse resources and functions of forest ecosystems (wood, food, medicine and food plants, game animals and birds, recreation, environment forming and environment protection, etc.) under stable and favourable for man ecological conditions. In such approach, forest practices are conserved or limited in different degree on the territories and biotypes of most significance in the term of species, coenosis and population diversity, as well as most vulnerable to anthropogenic pressure.
Declining of biodiversity and ecological sustainability resulting from intensive forest management is now well recognised. At the moment forestry in Russian Karelia is faced to a choice: whether follow the Western challenge or try to develop our own way in order to avoid losses of biological diversity of forest ecosystems. Clear-cutting is a forest management practice that has been recognised as creating many rapid and long-lasting changes on the forest floor. The more moderate disturbance of selective cutting is known to reduce these radical changes, but whether this decrease the effects on the biodiversity of forest ecosystems is not known. For this studies aimed to estimate the effect of different logging practices on different components of forest ecosystems in the experimental forest area is of crucial interest.
The experimental forest area "Matrosy" is located in the limits of typical landscape for middle taiga subzone of Karelia. Forestry approaches utilised here in the past and nowadays are, in some extend conventional for whole region. The above-mentioned area, thus may be used as an experimental object for wide range researches, dealing with forestry optimisation.
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