An empirically based approach to self-organization in forest ecosystems

The concept of synergetics is applied to forest ecosystem theory in order to bridge the current gap to forestry and land-use planning. Forest ecosystem types are introduced as statistical ensembles populating the basins of attraction of natural and man-made forests in multidimensional ecological state spaces. Ecosystem types can be considered as elementary units of a holistic approach to ecosystems. A universally applicable formalism is developed to derive, to model, and to visualize forest ecosystem types from an ecological data set. A series of natural and artificial forest ecosystem types of the Northeast German lowlands is modeled in an ecogram in dependence on nutrient and water supply status. The practical applications of the presented approach are discussed finally.