Forests are complex open systems with multiple functions. To maintain high standards and credibility among the public, forest managers need to draw on the expertise of a variety of scientific disciplines, including the humanities, the physical, the engineering and biological sciences, not...

Nearly 500 million people around the world rely on forests for their livelihoods, among them a high number of forest and wood industry workers. Unfortunately, not enough attention has been paid to the conditions of both these types of workers and of the contributions that they can make to...

Understanding diversity-productivity relationships (DPRs) is of theoretical importance and has practical implications for biodiversity conservation and forest management. Although the effects of species diversity and structural diversity on productivity have been a focus of intense research, the...

Even though the site index is a popular method for describing forest productivity, its use is limited in uneven-aged multispecies forests. Accordingly, the site form (SF) is an alternative measure of productivity to the site index based on the tree height-diameter relationship. Our study aims to...

Ernst Assmann belonged to the most influential German forest scientists in the twentieth century. His systemic and scale-overarching scientific approach toward forest dynamics triggered a wealth of research lines that continue up to the present day. In this article, we recall his scientific vita,...

Understanding how and why species abundance distributions (SADs) vary with sampling scale has been a long-standing issue in ecology. By fitting various SAD models with observations collected in three large forest field plots, the objective of this study is to explore how the shape of SADs and the...

The Khentii Mountains of Northern Mongolia, where the Siberian forest belt borders the steppe, represent a unique and greatly untouched ecosystem. Altogether 15  000 km² of primeval forest and grassland are completely protected by law (Mongolian Ministry for nature and environment 1996). Timber...

Understanding the driving factors for individual tree growth is of great significance to devise effective forest management strategies. Such information can be used to select appropriate tree harvesting times, and to provide valuable guidance for creating suitable local environmental conditions...

This paper presents the French version of the Long Term Ecological Research in forestry, including a sample of accomplishments, and shows the role of local Intensive Study Plots involving forest demography and genetics: in a regional network, on the effects of land use on development of forests in...

We present an approach to generate and evaluate different silvicultural development paths and to optimize the development of a Norway spruce stand, using a long-term planning horizon. To generate a silvicultural path, the maximum stand density was applied. At each thinning event, three possible...