Restoring biodiversity to pine afforestations in Israel

SummaryThis paper presents a practitioner's perspective of the Keren Kayemeth Leisrael's (KKL – Israel's Forest Service) forest management policy, including actions encouraging biological diversity attributes to Israel's planted conifer forests. These changes are reviewed in light of institutional changes within the KKL, recent global initiatives and scientific trends concerning biodiversity, ecologically oriented forestry and sustainable forest management.The management of Israel's planted conifer forests for biological diversity values is a relatively new phenomenon. Most of Israel's high forests were planted and consist primarily of a small core group of native and exotic Mediterranean conifers. Over time, these simplified afforestations evolved into a complex set of forest stands – a “near-native” type of forest ecosystem embodying a sum total of natural and artificial processes. They can thus serve as models to help visualise and understand how plantation-type forests can be converted into complex afforestations systems possessing a higher degree of structural, functional, compositional and genetic diversity.