LAUSR

Abstract Forests in the southeastern USA have been actively managed for timber and other wood products for over 200 years. The wood pellet industry is relatively new and has generated polarised debate between those who want little or no active management of forests in the region, and those who point to the region’s long history of sustainable forest management (broadly a debate between those seeking to protect nature from use and proponents of production forestry). Outside plantations grown for the purpose, the wood pellet industry claims to use thinnings and forest residues from final timber harvests (as well as sawmill residues), logging waste and material from forests harvested for timber. Claims that the industry uses material from the forest that would otherwise have no market and that this is a co-product of harvests that would happen in any case have been contested and assertions made about the damage the industry is doing to forests in the region. The academic literature on specific impacts of the wood pellet industry on the ecology of southeastern forests is sparse. In order to determine likely impacts of the industry, an assessment was made of the broader impacts of harvest and extraction techniques which remove residues generally. The impact of such forest management techniques on terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity has not been systematically assessed, despite the large volume of literature over several decades. A systematic synthesis of the literature was therefore conducted to create an evidence base of knowledge of relevance to future policy and practice. The synthesis followed best practice guidelines on conducting systematic synthesis. In addition to a searchable database of relevant research, an interactive cartographic map was produced which enables users to interrogate the evidence base according to criteria defined in the format of the evidence data sheets created for each study. In total 19,919 articles were assessed systematically, from which 211 studies were identified and analysed in detail. The majority of studies (145) in the evidence base report no negative impacts of forestry practices on biodiversity (i.e. 69% of the studies). The review covers in detail the subset of papers that do report negative impacts and these can also be filtered and interrogated separately on the systematic map. The analysis shows that within this small subset of studies, impacts appear to be greatest for land invertebrates (26% of all negative impacts, i.e. 8% of all studies).