Potential of Kriging for forest management planning

摘要

Forest management planning aims at fulfilling the overall goals for the forest owner. The economic optimal scheduling of treatments in spatially discrete forest stands, the time dimension, has been thoroughly investigated in research. The spatial dimension is less investigated. Normally, spatially discrete stands are defined as treatment units. These are inventoried using subjective methods with unknown precision. As an alternative to this conventional way to describe the forest, the present investigation used kriging for estimating forest characteristics spatially continuously using georeferenced sample plots. Using stratification by age, several variables interesting for forest management planning displayed spatial autocorrelation, even though the estate was thoroughly managed. No hardwood variables displayed the autocorrelation necessary for using kriging. 20 refs, 6 figs, 2 tabs.