Objective
Information concerning the non-timber resources of forests is needed to support the sustainable development of forests following the Rio Summit and the ministerial conferences on the protection of forests in Europe. Recent studies, e.g. In the scope of EC DGVI EFICSI -project, and workshops, e.g. UN-ECE/FAO Expert Consultation on Global Forest Resourc Assessment 2000 (FRA 2000), Kotka-III, June 1996, showed that there is a lack of such informati on the national, European and global level. Information on non-wood goods and services provided by individual countries is either insufficient or cannot be combined on the European level. This is due to differences in the attributes assessed on the national level, the applied systems of nomenclature and a lack statistical methods and assessment techniques to combine data originating from different sources. There are several international efforts going on concerning monitoring sustainable forest management. Among them are the Helsinki process (Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe and its follow-up meetings) and the environmental indicators and reports made by OECD and United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). The Helsinki process, a working definition of sustainable forest management was agreed on (Ministerial Conference...1993 Attempt to make the definition operational (what the definition means and how it should be measured) are the so called Par European criteria and indicators. The Helsinki 1996 meeting for the CSD Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, called ISCI, stated in its background report (Granholm et al. 1996) that the possibilities which new technologies (e.g. Remote sensing, on-line information systems) give for providing information on the recently defined key factors of sustainable forest management should be utilised. The need for international co-operation and co-ordination in defining the scale, scope, content, frequency, transparency and dissemination of data was recognised.
The proposed project has four main objectives:
Objective 1: Development of methods that increase the degree of detail of the provided information on non-timber forest resources in relation to the size (area) of the unit of reference.
Objective 2: Development of methods for providing harmonised information on non-timber forest resources on the Europea level.
Objective 3: Analysis of the cost-efficiency of the proposed alternative methods and the impact on necessary infrastructure.
Objective 4: Validation of the proposed methods in selected test sites in the boreal, temperate, Alpine and Mediterranean region. The project will focus on the development of assessment methods that increase the relation between the required degree o detail and sensitivity of information on non-timber functions in relation to the spatial resolution, i.e. The grain or size of the unit of reference. To increase the grain/ information ratio new statistical approaches will be developed that are applicable for the combination of field based samples and remote sensing techniques especially for the assessment of non-metric data, i.e. Data that are nominal or ordinal in nature and which are not measured but assessed according to definitions..
The statistical method will be general in nature and will not be related to specific attributes or indicators (objective I). A scale dependent list of selected key attributes that describe the non-timber forest resources and include measurement rules and definitions, will be given. The list will consider the Helsinki criteria and indicators and will be applicable in all eco-regions of Europe to guarantee harmonised information on the European level (objective II). Each of the developed assessment alternatives will be analysed according to its cost-efficiency, i.e. The cost needed to obtain a specified level of accuracy and precision for key attributes at different scales (objective III). The proposed assessment alternatives will be tested and validated in five test areas in different European eco-regions (objective IV). EFICS = European Forest Information and Communication System, see Council Regulation (EEC) No. 1615/89 of 29 May 1989
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturegrains and oilseeds
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestrysilviculture
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringremote sensing
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
01737 THARANDT
Germany