Forest inventory and biodiversity | Inventaire forestier et biodiversite
2002
Rondeux, J. (Faculte des Sciences agronomiques, Gembloux (Belgium). Unite de Gestion et Economie forestiere)
In forestry as well as in other areas we need methods to assess biodiversity in such a way that decision-makers can appreciate biodiversity values. How to measure biodiversity is open to debate and opinions often differ about the definition of this complex concept. It is obvious, from the wide definition of biodiversity, that it is impossible to monitor all the expected and unexpected variability. Traditional forest inventories have the main objective to provide only information on timber, its amount and the evolution over time. Nowadays the inclusion of non-timber variables in forest inventories is gaining importance. In more and more inventories some environmental variables are considered such as site or vegetation variables. Considering the assessment of biodiversity (for vegetation point of view) the scope of most forest inventories has to be expanded to include additional variables and the design of the inventories has to be changed. The objective of this paper is to analyse various aspects of forest surveys with respect to biodiversity issues and to emphasize the current needs for further methodological progress. The attention is put on the assessment and monitoring of the biodiversity in sample based surveys at the forest stand level or at the national level. Indirect methods might be alternative solutions to study the relationships between structure of growing stock and other species like ground vegetation. Field measurement, air and space borne remote sensing should also be other relevant data sources to be taken into account. If a great number of biodiversity elements can be derived by means of variables measured in forest inventories, other new variables have to be considered. It seems to be realistic to use forest inventories for getting informations upon biodiversity at regional or national levels provided problems of space and scale are not underestimated.
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