Sustainable management is a problem for countries that depend on natural resources. Forests contain much of the world's biodiversity and offer significant renewable resources with a potentially small ecological and carbon footprint. Yet as global demand for forest products increases, conserving biodiversity has become more urgent and challenging.

Forestry and Biodiversity makes the case for adaptive management – a structured approach to learning by doing – to sustain biodiversity in managed forests. It draws on the theory and principles of conservation biology and forest ecology and illustrates them, and the challenges they pose, through a practical, real-world study of a 1.1 million hectare commercial operation in a coastal temperate rainforest.