Critical zone perspectives for managing changing forests

Forest management is under intensifying ecological and societal pressures amid the current geological epoch, which some see becoming the Anthropocene. These pressures extend to temporal and physical scales typical of geology; however, integrating geological processes into forest management has lagged behind the inclusion of shorter-term and surficial ecosystem processes. As such, we examine the field of critical zone science for connections that translate geologic knowledge to forest management and planning. Earth's critical zone is the thin near-surface zone spanning from the bottom of circulating groundwater to the top of the atmospheric boundary layer of forest canopies. We explore four case studies from regions of the U.S.A. to highlight how recent critical zone discoveries inform contemporary forest management challenges. Some examples of management-relevant research include mediation of the impacts of climate change on forest productivity across gradients in geology, aspect, and topography; the role of bedrock water storage on drought resistance; hydrology-vegetation interactions following pest outbreaks; and quantification of water partitioning and erosion following fire. The accelerated pace of critical zone discovery has been synchronous with increased availability of open-source data resources for forest managers to expand this framework in management and planning.