Forest management is regarded to be natural in the case when we try to make natural processes draw closer. The emphasis on natural forest management has become stonger recently. Reasons for this, among others, include concerns for forest biodiversity, climate change, large-scale biotic and abiotic damage. In Hungary, natural forest management is also supported by law. However, it should be noted that natural forest management is not a new field of forestry - we can say that it is about 100-150 years old. In the the second half of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, both in Europe and in Hungary many experts recommended that we take into more careful consideration natural processes and forest dinamics in forest management and the change of traditional cutting for selective cutting and single tree selection in suitable forests (eg Biolley, Möller, Krutzsch, Roth, Bund, Kaán, Radó, Jablánczy, Borsos).

Nonetheless, these methods have not been introduced in the majority of the deciduous forests, moreover, they were more or less forgotten by the end of the 20th century. The basic tools for natural forest management are forest regeneration based on gap cutting or group preparatory felling, the prolongation of the renewal period, and the implementation of intermediate cutting randomly in space. As a result, in the course of managing forests uneven-aged stands will develop from the present stands of more or less the same age that will be cultivated by means of single-tree selection or selection cutting.

1st image: Without human intervention deciduous forests of the temperate zone would regenerate with spontaneous gap regeneration. Therefore, the basic tool for natural forest regeneration will be gap cutting.

However, the transformation of the forest image, the transition from cutting system to selection cutting sytem require a long time. The complex of the procedures aimed at system transition is called transition silviculture. Natural silviculture is not sufficiently known either from scientific or practical point of view. It should be stressed that due to significant differences between site conditions foreign examples are hardly applicable in our home forests. It seems resonable to introduce targeted forest research on the one hand, and, to a certain extent, methods that have not been used so far into home forest practice, on the other. Since the results of the transition can not be guaranteed, putting it into practice needs an utmost consideration and care. Rationally speaking, instead of working by a template it is rather advisable to apply several methods in a way that results can be well comparable. Within a few years regeneration will clearly indicate the successfulness of our method in terms of silviculture.