Dataset Information

Actual European forest management by region, tree species and owner based on 714,000 re-measured trees in national forest inventories.

ABSTRACT:

Background

European forests have a long record of management. However, the diversity of the current forest management across nations, tree species and owners, is hardly understood. Often when trying to simulate future forest resources under alternative futures, simply the yield table style of harvesting is applied. It is now crucially important to come to grips with actual forest management, now that demand for wood is increasing and the EU Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry Regulation has been adopted requiring 'continuation of current management practices' as a baseline to set the Forest Reference Level carbon sink.

Methods

Based on a large dataset of 714,000 re-measured trees in National Forest inventories from 13 regions, we are now able to analyse actual forest harvesting.

Conclusions

From this large set of repeated tree measurements we can conclude that there is no such thing as yield table harvesting in Europe. We found general trends of increasing harvest probability with higher productivity of the region and the species, but with important deviations related to local conditions like site accessibility, state of the forest resource (like age), specific subsidies, importance of other forest services, and ownership of the forest. As a result, we find a huge diversity in harvest regimes. Over the time period covered in our inventories, the average harvest probability over all regions was 2.4% yr-1 (in number of trees) and the mortality probability was 0.4% yr-1. Our study provides underlying and most actual data that can serve as a basis for quantifying 'continuation of current forest management'. It can be used as a cornerstone for the base period as required for the Forest Reference Level for EU Member States.

SUBMITTER: Schelhaas MJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6231657 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Actual European forest management by region, tree species and owner based on 714,000 re-measured trees in national forest inventories.

Schelhaas Mart-Jan MJ Fridman Jonas J Hengeveld Geerten M GM Henttonen Helena M HM Lehtonen Aleksi A Kies Uwe U Krajnc Nike N Lerink Bas B Ní Dhubháin Áine Á Polley Heino H Pugh Thomas A M TAM Redmond John J JJ Rohner Brigitte B Temperli Cristian C Vayreda Jordi J Nabuurs Gert-Jan GJ

PloS one 20181112 11

<h4>Background</h4>European forests have a long record of management. However, the diversity of the current forest management across nations, tree species and owners, is hardly understood. Often when trying to simulate future forest resources under alternative futures, simply the yield table style of harvesting is applied. It is now crucially important to come to grips with actual forest management, now that demand for wood is increasing and the EU Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry Regulati ...[more]

PMID: 30418996

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundProgress in the field of evolutionary forest ecology has been hampered by the huge challenge of phenotyping trees across their ranges in their natural environments, and the limitation in high-resolution environmental information.FindingsThe GenTree Platform contains phenotypic and environmental data from 4,959 trees from 12 ecologically and economically important European forest tree species: Abies alba Mill. (silver fir), Betula pendula Roth. (silver birch), Fagus sylvatica L. (European beech), Picea abies (L.) H. Karst (Norway spruce), Pinus cembra L. (Swiss stone pine), Pinus halepensis Mill. (Aleppo pine), Pinus nigra Arnold (European black pine), Pinus pinaster Aiton (maritime pine), Pinus sylvestris L. (Scots pine), Populus nigra L. (European black poplar), Taxus baccata L. (English yew), and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak). Phenotypic (height, diameter at breast height, crown size, bark thickness, biomass, straightness, forking, branch angle, fructification), regeneration, environmental in situ measurements (soil depth, vegetation cover, competition indices), and environmental modeling data extracted by using bilinear interpolation accounting for surrounding conditions of each tree (precipitation, temperature, insolation, drought indices) were obtained from trees in 194 sites covering the species' geographic ranges and reflecting local environmental gradients.ConclusionThe GenTree Platform is a new resource for investigating ecological and evolutionary processes in forest trees. The coherent phenotyping and environmental characterization across 12 species in their European ranges allow for a wide range of analyses from forest ecologists, conservationists, and macro-ecologists. Also, the data here presented can be linked to the GenTree Dendroecological collection, the GenTree Leaf Trait collection, and the GenTree Genomic collection presented elsewhere, which together build the largest evolutionary forest ecology data collection available.

Dataset Information

Actual European forest management by region, tree species and owner based on 714,000 re-measured trees in national forest inventories.

Background

Methods

Conclusions

Publications

Actual European forest management by region, tree species and owner based on 714,000 re-measured trees in national forest inventories.

Similar Datasets

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