Spatial Modelling in Forest Ecology and Management

Beschreibung

In this book, GIS-based geomorphological, statistical, and geostatistical methods are used to improve the ecological site description of forest areas. Possibilities and limitations of the regionalization of climatic, soil, and macrofauna point measurements are presented. The resulting maps of indicators provide a broad and precise basis for forest planning and are essential for an integration of ecological and economic aspects of forest management.The applicability for forest practice is exemplified by the delimitation of forest site classes and of forest growth districts as well as the modelling of potential natural woodland communities. A scenario technique was used to simulate the forest stand development in the Harz mountains and to reveal the economic and ecological results of new management guidelines that are favoured by the forest administration. Spatial modelling and GIS-based information and planning systems provide improved data bases that are valuable instruments to describe the consequences of different management guidelines. Thus, they make a major contribution to a fruitful discussion about sustainable forest management.
At the end of the 1970s, when signs of destabilization of forests became visible in Eu rope on a large scale, it soon became obvious that the syndrome called "forest de cline" was caused by a network of interrelated factors of abiotic and biotic origin. All attempts to explain the wide-spread syndrome by a single cause, and there were many of them, failed or can only be regarded as a single mosaic stone in the network of caus es behind the phenomenon. Forest ecosystems are highly complex natural or quasi natural systems, which exhibit different structures and functions and as a conse quence different resilience to internal or external stresses. Moreover, forest ecosys tems have a long history, which means that former impacts may act as predisposing factors for other stresses. The complexity and the different history of forest ecosys tems are two reasons that make it difficult to assess the actual state and future devel opment of forests. But there are two other reasons: one is the large time scale in which forests react, the other is the idiosyncrasy of the reactions on different sites. Due to the slow reaction and the regional complexity of the abiotic environment of forest ecosys tems, a profound analysis of each site and region is necessary to identify the underly ing causes and driving forces when attempting to overcome the destruction of forest ecosystems.
The focus of the book is the integration of spatial statistics, GIS-technology, ecosystem studies, and scenario modelling It extends the information gained at the stand level to larger spacial scales

Autor*in

Martin Jansen

Themen in »Spatial Modelling in Forest Ecology and Management«

Fauna Forest ecology Forest management GIS Geographic Information System (GIS) Geoinformationssysteme Kriging Regionalization Spatial modelling development ecology ecosystem forest remote sensing Forestry Management

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