Although the majority of the world's forest ecosystems are dominated by uneven-sized multi-species stands, forest management practice and theory has focused on the development of plantation monocultures to maximize the supply of timber at low cost. Societal expectations are changing, however, and uneven-aged multi-species ecosystems, selectively managed as Continuous Cover Forestry ( CCF ), are often believed to be superior to monocultures in addressing a wide range of expectations. This book presents methods which are relevant to CCF management and planning: analysing forest structures, silvicultural and planning, economic evaluation, based on examples in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America.

Information about continuous cover forest management is urgently needed People and forest landowners want to avoid clearfelling Forestry paradigm is changing for plantation forestry to near-natural management

Inhalt

1 Historical Emergence and Current Application of CCF.- 2 Forest Structure and Diversity.- 3 Continuous Cover Forestry in Finland - Recent Research Results.- 4 Regulation of Timber Yield Sustainability for Tropical and Subtropical Moist Forests: Ecosilvicultural Paradigms and Economic Constraints.- 5 The Economics of Continuous Cover Forestry.- 6 Optimizing Continuous Cover Forest Management .- 7 Modelling Continuous Cover Forests.- 8 Bootstrap simulation, Markov decision process models, and role of discounting in the valuation of ecological criteria in uneven-aged forest management.- 9 Resource Assessment Techniques for Continuous Cover Forestry.