Module 2 Introduction

Forest resources management is a branch of forestry concerned with the overall administrative, economic, legal, social, scientific and technical aspects of forestry (e.g., forest inventory and monitoring, forest thinning and tending, forest planning and design, particularly approaching planning and adaptive management). Management can be based on conservation or economics or both. Forest management alternatives have changed with social development however the basic survey and monitoring procedures and methods are still valid. This module discusses all the categories of forest resources inventory. Particular attention is paid to forest resource monitoring and plots survey.

Since forest management is a long-term issue, the outcomes of different management alternatives should be predicted and assessed to support the development of sound management strategies. Growth and yield models are part of this process. In this module we categorize the models into whole stand-level, size-class and individual-tree models according to the modeling entity (stand, size class, tree) and discuss their fundamental features (i.e., scope of application, specific usability, limitations).

A forest is the largest carbon pool in the terrestrial ecosystem. It is a multi-functional ecosystem where carbon accumulation capacity is its most important property when considering biodiversity maintenance and ecological stability. Forest carbon storage in the form of biomass is the most robust indicator of a forest’s strength of interaction with the environment (e.g., mitigating the warming trend by reducing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere). The clean development mechanism (CDM) makes clarifying the carbon sequestration of a forest imperative for industrialized countries. To this end, various methods for determining forest carbon storage have been developed. This module introduces the general methods in forest carbon measurement.