Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences.Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences by DavidB. Lindenmayer; PhilipJ. Burton;JerryF. FranklinReview by: By Mark E. HarmonThe Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 84, No. 3 (September 2009), p. 289Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/644668 .

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Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Conse-quences.

By David B. Lindenmayer, Philip J. Burton, and JerryF. Franklin. Washington (DC): Island Press. $65.00(hardcover); $32.50 (paper). xvi � 227 p.; ill.;index. ISBN: 978-1-59726-402-0 (hc); 978-1-59726-403-7 (pb). 2008.

This timely, short book (227 pages, including sixchapters, a glossary, references, and an index) exam-ines the ecological rationale and consequences of anincreasingly important activity in forest manage-ment: salvage logging. It is highly probable that “nat-ural” disturbances will increase given current rateand direction of climate change; the call to do“something” in response will only grow. The seem-ingly logical response is to salvage all of those deadtrees for ecological as well as economic reasons.However, this book makes the case that salvage hasfew ecological benefits. By reviewing the effects ofnatural disturbances versus logging, the authorsdemonstrate there is less overlap between these twoforms of disturbance than is often assumed. Thethird chapter makes this distinction even clearer,pointing out the numerous ways salvage removes keybiological legacies, interferes with natural recoveryprocesses, and often leads to wholesale changes inecosystem function that undermine the entire ratio-nal of assisting “recovery.” I particularly liked theconcept of bycatch: the inadvertent removal of manybiological legacies, including surviving trees as sal-vage proceeds. Realizing there are often valid safetyand economic reasons for salvage, the fifth chapteroffers ways to minimize impacts, including the no-tion of considering whether salvage, given manage-ment objectives, is really the best option. The con-cluding chapter highlights the need for increasedawareness of salvage impacts, a reassessment of con-cepts and vocabulary associated with salvage, and astronger scientific basis for decisions starting with thestep of deliberately leaving untreated controls when-ever salvage is implemented. Although I had somebones to pick with the authors about mixing distur-bance severity and intensity, I found the text clearlywritten and organized, well documented, and quiteinteresting. This book will be valuable for anyonecurious about the future of forest management andbiological conservation.

Mark E. Harmon, Forest Ecosystems, Oregon StateUniversity, Corvallis, Oregon

Bee Pollination in Agricultural Ecosystems.Edited by Rosalind R. James and Theresa L. Pitts-Singer. Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress. $74.00. xiv � 232 p.; ill.; index. ISBN:978-0-19-531695-7. 2008.

Long relegated to the sidelines of agricultural sci-ence and policy, bee pollination has emerged inthe opening decade of this century as a national

priority. This is the outcome of two aggravatingprocesses: agricultural acreage is shifting towardmore pollinator-dependent crops while, at thesame time, pollinators seem to be declining. No-where is this tension more evident than in thoseagricultural ecosystems that depend on the social,colony-forming honey bee, Apis mellifera, the bee ofbeekeeping fame. An introduced species through-out much of its modern range, it is the belea-guered host of many globally dispersed parasitesand pathogens.

One way to relax this tension may be to paymore attention to native bee pollinators. This isthe position taken by this volume’s editors, staffscientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture(USDA) bee laboratory in Logan, Utah—a distin-guished center of the study of native and intro-duced non-Apis bees. Among wild bees, those witha solitary life habit are the majority. Their localnumbers range from abundant to rare and, withnotable exceptions, their management translatesto experiments in applied ecology. This meansthat from a commercial pollination perspectivewild bees remain outside the mainstream, buttheir sheer abundance and diversity—at least 77genera and 2600 species in North and CentralAmerica—argue strongly that agriculturists cannotafford to ignore them.

This book will go a long way toward keeping non-Apis bees in the limelight. It represents a compen-dium of the latest thinking on the issues surroundingthe place of wild bees in sustainable agriculture.Among its 13 chapters are up-to-date overviews ongeneral bee biology and the pollination manage-ment and economics of non-Apis bees. These chap-ters include some of the latest work on greenhousepollination, landscape-scale conservation, and theuse of native bees in plant conservation. I was pleasedto find an extended treatment of the managementof Nomia melanderi—western North America’s nativealfalfa pollinator and the world’s only example of apractically managed soil-nesting bee. The conclud-ing chapters focus on the impacts of introduced beesand plants, and include two discussions on theuniquely contemporary issue of genetically modifiedcrops—their effects on bees and the effects of bees asvectors of modified genes into wild plant popula-tions.

Bee Pollination in Agricultural Ecosystems is a goodsynthesis of the state of knowledge of non-Apiscrop pollinators. I highly recommend it for read-ers interested in the public conversation on beedecline and pollination.

Keith S. Delaplane, Entomology, University ofGeorgia, Athens, Georgia

September 2009 289NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS

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