Promoting ecological engineering for restoration of biodiversity in temperate forests

In temperate forest, managers have both used civil engineering, biological engineering and ecological principles to optimize one function: wood production, flood regulation or reduction of soil erosion. Other forest practitioners used biological interactions and biotic controls to manage uneven-aged stands, especially in mountain forests. These actions just required the knowledge and control of both coarse biological and physical processes at a local scale. The challenges inherent to solve multi-scale biodiversity changes are crucial today. In order to achieve these crucial issues and optimize several ecological functions and ecosystem services, spatial modelling approaches are developed at a landscape level using species traits associated with environmental databases. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Laboratory "Biochemistry and ecology of continental environments