There also appears to be a tendency to assume transformation of plantations will increase biodiversity. This may be true at the stand level, but biodiversity should be assessed at much larger scales where the structure of individual stands is secondary to the distribution of structures across the landscape. Biodiversity will likely be maximized by landscapes that include both even-aged and uneven-aged stands (Kerr, 1999).
Finally, there is the perception that uneven-aged stands are more natural than even-aged stands. In North America, there is considerable evidence that many forests were naturally even-aged because of the prevalence of stand-replacement disturbances prior to European settlement. In other disturbance regimes, a few residual trees may have survived and multiaged structures resulted (Agee, 1993; Oliver and Larson, 1996). In neither case did these disturbances leave the regular stand structures that are the target of many current forest managers. Instead they were highly irregular and quite variable at the stand, landscape and regional scales. The implication is the transformation of plantations to these artificial structures Ð represented by reverse-J diameter distributions and sometimes described as ``balanced'' Ð may be as
unnatural as the plantations they will replace.