Contemporary high resolution European forest structure assessed using tree-level National Forest Inventory data

Abstract

This exploratory study presents an objective and consistent approach for assessing forest structure across multiple European countries, focusing on the distributions of tree species and tree diameter at breast height (DBH) as assessed by European National Forest Inventories (NFIs) and one landscape inventory. We distinguish six structural classes, ranging from mono-specific plots with a narrow (regular) DBH distribution to multi-species plots with a wide (irregular) DBH distribution. We used tree level data on basal area, species, and diameter, from 18 countries, and harmonised the data as much as possible by adopting a common diameter measurement threshold and by scaling the different plot radii to one ha. Data from 255,418 inventory plots indicate that roughly half of the forests are dominated by a single-species, while the other half consists of multiple-species. According to our approach, the predominant structural type in the surveyed countries is characterized by single-species dominance (56%) and a narrow DBH distribution. The relatively small plot radii across inventories and the diameter threshold of 10 cm also contribute to dominance of this structural type. The single-species regular class was the most prevalent ranging from 35.8% in Switzerland to 79.7% in Spain. The second most important was the multiple-species regular class, present on 37.7% of the forest area. Although the plots are not weighed to the full forest area, these results indicate a regular forest structure on 94% of Europe’s forests. The distribution of forest area per country over the categories varied only moderately. A shortcoming of a groundbased study is the challenge of harmonisation due to the different plot design of NFIs, showing a range in the plot radii from 9 to 25 meters hampering the comparison between countries. The results as presented at 0.2 degrees resolution (approximately 20 x 20 km) provide insight into forest structure in a consistent manner and can be updated in the future based on new releases of forest inventories. Although we did not study the effect of forest management on the current structure, these results are a basis to report temporal and spatial effects of management changes at this semi-high resolution, highly relevant to the EU Nature Restoration Law. We see this spatially explicit result as very promising, with advantages compared to the alternative of highly aggregated international statistics.