Advances in Forest Inventory for Sustainable Forest Management and Biodiversity Monitoring: 76 (Forestry Sciences, 76) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1402017154 ISBN 13: 9781402017155

Publisher: Springer, 2003

Synopsis

Forests represent a remnant wilderness of high recreational value in the densely populated industrial societies, a threatened natural resource in some regions of the world and a renewable reservoir of essential raw materials for the wood processing industry. In June 1992 the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro initiated a world-wide process of negotiation with the aim of ensuring sustainable management, conservation and development of forest resources. Although there seems to be unanimous support for sustainable development from all quarters, there is no generally accepted set of indicators which allows comparisons to be made between a given situation and a desirable one. In a recent summary paper prepared by the FAO Forestry and Planning Division, Ljungman et al. (1999) find that forest resources continue to diminish, while being called upon to produce a greater range of goods and services and that calls for sustainable forest management will simply go unheeded if the legal, policy and administrative environment do not effectively control undesirable practices. Does the concept of sustainable forest management represent not much more than a magic formula for achieving consensus, a vague idea which makes it difficult to match action to rhetoric? The concept of sustainable forest management is likely to remain an imprecise one, but we can contribute to avoiding management practices that are clearly unsustainable.

About this title

Synopsis

The increasing awareness and concern of people, researchers and decision makers for the maintenance and enhancement of goods and services provided by forest ecosystems significantly widened the scope of information needs for sustainable forest management on the task-specific, integrative and strategic level. Forest resource assessments have to provide reliable, harmonized, politically relevant, cost-efficient and intuitively visible information on the multiple functions of forests in the form of statistics, georeferenced data and thematic cartography. In this perspective, the need of reviewing and discussing improvements of forest inventory and monitoring approaches is acknowledged to cope with assessment and analysis tools required for the full understanding of forest ecosystems, from local to global scales.Only a limited amount of information can be provided by adding a set of new attributes to the list of attributes commonly used in assessing the productive function of forests and utilizing traditional survey designs.

The diversity of information needs that have to be satisfied by current forest resource assessments require the adoption of new survey approaches and the extension of assessment frames from forests to landscapes. This is deemed distinctively true for the issues related to sustainable forest management and biodiversity monitoring.Within this framework, the major purpose of this volume of Kluwer's "Forestry Science Series" is to give readers hands-on experiences about inventory and monitoring problems and potential by reviewing a selection of approaches, methods and tools for multi-resource forest surveys, with special reference to remote sensing, statistical sampling and spatial analyses. The book is intended for researchers and practitioners in the field of forest and environmental planning, environmental monitoring and environmental policies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1402017154
• ISBN 13: 9781402017155
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 458
• Editor: Corona Piermaria, Köhl Michael, Marchetti Marco