On the potential of Kriging for forest management planning

Forest management planning aims at fufilling the goals of the forest owner. Scheduling treatments of forest stands, both in time and space, have been well investigated previously. Usually, however, these studies have assumed spatially discrete stands, representing imagined treatment units. Furthermore, the stands have been inventoried using ocular methods with varying and unknown precision. As an alternative to this conventional way of describing the forest, an objective circular plot inventory method was used, in the present investigation, to represent the forest on a 400 ha estate. Kriging was used to estimate spatially continuous forest characteristics from the georeferenced inventory plots. Spatial discontinuity, for example, between young and old forests, was handled by making an initial stratification of the forest into age-classes. This approach enabled several spatially continuous variables, of interest to forest management planning, to be estimated at all locations. The stratification made it possible to preserve the real-world mosaic of stands resulting from intensive management as, e.g., clear-cutting boundaries.