From western coastal conifer to eastern oak and from southern longleaf pine forests to northern hardwoods, forest managers strive to create conditions for healthy, sustainable, and productive forests. Why is natural forest regeneration not helping the cause?

For millennia, natural disturbance regimes, including anthropogenic fire and hunting practices, led to forest regeneration patterns that created a diversity of forest lands across the present-day United States. But dramatic changes in climates, invasive species, the human population, and land use have created novel disturbance regimes that are causing challenges to securing desired natural regeneration. A Northern Research Station scientist and his partners present a national perspective and synthesis on the barriers to natural regeneration and articulate the challenges managers face when trying to implement sustainable forest management. Scientists document the complex, interconnectedness of the ecological-social-economic factors that either foster or inhibit achievement of desired forest conditions and landscapes through management of natural regeneration, and provide an overview of the major barriers to natural regeneration. These barriers include: (1) contemporary forest structure and composition that inherently has low to moderate regeneration potential, (2) negative impacts of browsing by high-density herbivore populations, (3) increasing competition and mortality from invasive species, (4) adverse impacts of changing climate such as changes in environments and disturbance regimes that favor competitors, and (5) social-economic-political factors that constrain management. Examples from various regions of the Nation demonstrate both common themes and unique challenges managers encounter when they attempt to rely on natural regeneration of western coastal conifer, western ponderosa pine, eastern oak, and southern longleaf pine forests.