Kamalmuk, a Gitxsan native from northwestern British Columbia, u;derstood one role of canopy gaps well before Sernander (19361, Jones (1945), and Watt (1947) first formally recognized the importance of gaps in ecological regeneration and succession. A natural gap is formed by the death or fall of large branches, an individual tree, or a group of trees that results in a canopy opening, usually quantified in terms of projected land area (m’). Many researchers
have studied ecosystem processes in canopy gaps or described natural forests by their gap size distribution. Just as a natural forest has a distribution of gap sizes. a managed forest subject to harvesting and silvicultural intervention can have a gap size distribution. though this has rarely been quantified. Foresters have tended to quantify response to silvicultural
manipulations at the scale of the stand (a somewhat arbitrary unit of forest, relatively homogeneous in site. composition. and age structure throughout), often without regard for the fine-scale variation within a stand.