This is a brief review on the progress and impacts of China’s Natural Forest Protection Program that was initiated in response to massive flooding in 1998 of the major river basins of China. The program was heavily financed by the central government and was a success in terms of three program goals: timber harvest control in the natural forests; increase in the total area of forest protection; and, the successful resettlement of forest workers who were affected by reduced harvests. The ecological, social, and economic impacts of the program are discussed.

The biodiversity-productivity relationship is one of the focus areas in ecological research that is studied primarily through mixed species experiments. Recent efforts in forests, however, increasingly involve the use of observational data, due to the difficulty in establishing long-term, multispecies plantations. Caution is warranted in the observational databased causal relationships between biodiversity and productivity due to the potential confounding effects by environmental variations. In this article, we use a recent forest example to demonstrate how erroneous results could be generated in studying biodiversity-forest productivity relationships when species diversity is highly correlated with environmental variables (multicollinearity). In forestry, erroneous biodiversity-productivity relationships can mislead future research, industry decisions, and policy development. Forest researchers and managers should be aware of the issues associated with collinear data and validate research results with literature reports and professional knowledge. Options to deal with observational data are discussed.