Sustaining Forest Ecosystems

Klaus v. Gadow has been teaching forest management at the Universities of Stellenbosch in South Africa and Göttingen in Germany. After his retirement in 2006, Beijing has become his third academic home where his research focus included aspects of quantitative ecology.Chunyu Zhang (张春雨) is a professor of forest management at the Beijing Forestry University. The focus of his research is numerical ecology with particular emphasis on biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and forest modelling. Juan Gabriel Álvarez González is professor of forest biometrics at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Among his path breaking achievements are compatible biomass systems and simultaneous modeling of tree growth and forest production. Timo Pukkala is professor in the Department of Forest Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. He has extensive experience in forest modeling with particular emphasis on ecosystem design. Timo developedthe well-known MONSU system of forest planning. Xiuhai Zhao (赵秀海) is a professor of forest ecology who established a unique network of very large stem-mapped forest plots covering the major forest ecosystems in China. He is a recognized scientific leader who attracts a great number of talented students to his large research team.

• What is a Forest?.- Classification of Plant Communities.- Popular Myths.- Forest Anthromes: Domesticated Ecosystems.- Forest Assessment and Observation.- Forest Assessment.- Field Experiments.- Continuous Forest Observation.- Analysing Forest Ecosystems.- Forest Density.- Forest Heterogeneity and Structure.- Assessing Community Dissimilarity.- Analysing Harvest Events.- Reconstruction and Simulation.- The Shape and Growth of Forest Trees.- The Shape of Forest Trees.- Individual Tree Growth Models.- Selecting Trees for Harvest.- Forest Production.- Site Models.- Estimating Forest Production.- Compatible Models of Growth and Production.- Modeling Harvest Events.- Designing Forest Ecosystems.- Risks and Preferences.- Sustaining Planted Forests.- Sustaining Continuous Cover Forests.- Sustaining Green Landscapes.- Literature.- Index.