Design and analysis of forest development

During recent years, the old scientific discipline "forest management" experienced almost worldwide an unprecedented revival. Numerous original scientific contributions featuring new aspects of sustainable forest management supported by growth, yield and operations research, continue to appear in renowned international journals. Forests are complex open systems with multiple functions and to maintain credibility among the public, forest managers need to draw on the expertise of a variety of scientific disciplines, not only on the humanities, but increasingly also on forest engineering and forest biological sciences. The multi-disciplinary character of forest research can be utilized to achieve a more effective interface between science and politics. The objective of the paper is to present a coherent system of forest management which is suitable for rotation forestry as well as continuous cover forestry. The system includes three elements: a\) forest options planning, using specific tools to generate and evaluate silvicultural management options; b\) management demonstration and referencing, based on a network of managed and unmanaged field plots and c\) forest event analysis, involving preventative evaluation of silvicultural activities based on event-oriented resource assessment.