Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
4.5
2.9
Journals
Forests
Special Issues
125 Years of Forest Inventories—Past, Present and Future—Selected Papers from...
share announcement

125 Years of Forest Inventories—Past, Present and Future—Selected Papers from the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Inventory, Modeling and Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2017) | Viewed by 11839

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Marco Marchetti

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Biosciences and Territory, University of Molise, Via Francesco De Sanctis, 1, 86100 Campobasso, Italy
Interests: urban forest; landscape ecology; landscape planning; land management; forest management; environmental science
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Forest resources monitoring and assessment can nowadays be characterized as a complex experimental environment with a wide amount of ecological, silvicultural, operational, economic and social uncertainties that have a special role in supporting decision of policy makers and influence the long-term planning at global, national, regional and local scale. Basic sciences are involved: From geology and soil science to climate aspects and its modeling and monitoring; from tree species identification in the tropics to forest type classifications; from ecosystem ecology to the role of animals; from silviculture to resource planning. Otherwise, forest assessment and management benefit in special manner from advances and technological innovations in remote and proximal sensing development, LiDAR systems to measure and assess field plots, evolution and revolution in sampling techniques for forest inventory and biomass estimation methods, but also in engineering processes, machinery and equipment. Forest assessment is more and more strictly linked also to advances in forest economics and especially developments ecosystem services. PES (payments for ecosystem services), CDM (clean development mechanism), REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), and SFM (sustainable forest management) at global and regional level with new criteria and indicators, relationships into forests and other land cover—namely other wooded lands and trees outside forests—or use, especially forest and rangelands and rural areas are other very important topics.

For this Special Issue of Forests, we encourage original manuscripts from all fields, yet specifically those involving forest monitoring and modeling, in order to promote and advance knowledge about decision-making processes used in assessment for sustainable forest management planning.

Prof. Marco Marchetti
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Forest monitoring
  • Modeling resource assessment
  • Planning and assessment for managing ecosystem services
  • Forest and land use

Published Papers (3 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

27 pages, 2182 KiB  
Article
Use of Stereology in Forest Inventories—A Brief History and Prospects for the Future
by Thomas B. Lynch, Göran Ståhl and Jeffrey H. Gove
Forests 2018, 9(5), 251; https://doi.org/10.3390/f9050251 - 05 May 2018
Viewed by 2943
Abstract
Several forest inventory techniques utilize approaches that are similar to stereological approaches often applied in microscopy and other fields. Stereology is characterized by the description and estimation of properties of objects based on samples of lower dimension than the object, e.g., 2-dimensional slices [...] Read more.
Several forest inventory techniques utilize approaches that are similar to stereological approaches often applied in microscopy and other fields. Stereology is characterized by the description and estimation of properties of objects based on samples of lower dimension than the object, e.g., 2-dimensional slices from 3-dimensional objects, 1-dimensional probes from 3-dimensional or 2-dimensional objects and dimensionless points from higher dimensional objects. The stereological character of many forest inventory methods was historically developed independently of recognition of a relationship with stereology. Strip sampling of forests, common in the late 19th and early 20th century, can be considered as a sterelogical approach if the strip centerline is viewed as a 1-dimensional probe of tree inclusion zones on a land area. The stereological character of plot sampling and Bitterlich sampling becomes evident if one views these methods as samples of 1-dimensional probes for volume within tree inclusion zones, or dimensionless points sampling for basal area in inclusion zones. Traditional methods of estimation of tree stem volume include samples of 2-dimensional cross-sectional area at fixed points along the tree stem to estimate 3-dimensional volume. Though these traditional methods usually use a shape assumption (e.g., parabolic frustum) for short stem segments, we show how a random-systematic start estimator of stem cross-sections can provide a design-unbiased estimate of stem volume without using any stem shape assumptions. Monte Carlo integration estimators of tree volume such as importance sampling that are designed to depend on only a few (usually one or two) tree upper-stem height or cross-sectional samples can also be viewed as stereological methods. Several forest inventory methods such as Matern’s individual tree basal area estimator and sector sampling can be viewed as local stereology, in which sample lines or slices pass through a central point. Finally, we suggest potential applications of stereological principles in the emerging “big data” era characterized by lidar and other remote sensing data and the assemblage of large tree and stand datasets. We suggest a new stem volume estimator which may have potential for future use with terrestrial lidar. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue 125 Years of Forest Inventories—Past, Present and Future—Selected Papers from the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

2110 KiB  
Article
A Dynamic System of Growth and Yield Equations for Pinus patula
by Wenceslao Santiago-García, Eloísa Pérez-López, Gerónimo Quiñonez-Barraza, Gerardo Rodríguez-Ortiz, Elías Santiago-García, Faustino Ruiz-Aquino and Juan Carlos Tamarit-Urias
Forests 2017, 8(12), 465; https://doi.org/10.3390/f8120465 - 28 Nov 2017
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 5066
Abstract
Sustainable forest management needs tools that can predict how silvicultural treatments will affect cutting stands. Growth and yield systems are an example of these tools because they can represent periods of growth and yield of a stand in numerical terms. The aim of [...] Read more.
Sustainable forest management needs tools that can predict how silvicultural treatments will affect cutting stands. Growth and yield systems are an example of these tools because they can represent periods of growth and yield of a stand in numerical terms. The aim of this research was to develop a dynamic growth and yield timber system with the stand-level models approach for Pinus patula in even-aged forests of Ixtlán de Juárez, Oaxaca, Mexico. The data was obtained from two consecutive remeasurements of 66 permanent 400 m2 plots. With this information, prediction and projection equations in the algebraic difference approach for mean diameter at breast height (DBH), basal area and total volume per hectare were fitted through the seemingly unrelated regression technique. Mortality was fitted by the non-linear least squares method. A model of dominant height and site index (Levakovic II) with polymorphism was related to basal area, DBH, total volume ha−1 and mortality equations. The growth system generated an average optimal age rotation of 32 years when the current annual increment (CAI) was the same as the mean annual increment (MAI) for the mean site index and a density of 1500 trees ha−1 at five years. The growth and yield system developed is an important tool for planning forest management of even-aged P. patula forests. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue 125 Years of Forest Inventories—Past, Present and Future—Selected Papers from the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

2698 KiB  
Article
Effects of Cycle Length and Plot Density on Estimators for a National-Scale Forest Monitoring Sample Design
by Francis A. Roesch, Todd A. Schroeder and James T. Vogt
Forests 2017, 8(9), 325; https://doi.org/10.3390/f8090325 - 01 Sep 2017
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3517
Abstract
The resilience of a National Forest Inventory and Monitoring sample design can sometimes depend upon the degree to which it can adapt to fluctuations in funding. If a budget reduction necessitates the observation of fewer plots per year, some practitioners weigh the problem [...] Read more.
The resilience of a National Forest Inventory and Monitoring sample design can sometimes depend upon the degree to which it can adapt to fluctuations in funding. If a budget reduction necessitates the observation of fewer plots per year, some practitioners weigh the problem as a tradeoff between reducing the total number of plots and measuring the original number of plots over a greater number of years. Here, we explore some of the effects of differing plot intensities and cycle lengths on variants of three general classes of estimators for annual cubic meter per hectare volume, using a simulated population and appropriately-graduated sampling simulations. The simulations showed that an increase in cycle length yielded quite dramatic effects while differences due to a simulated reduction in plot intensity had more subtle effects. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue 125 Years of Forest Inventories—Past, Present and Future—Selected Papers from the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-3
Back to TopTop