Forest Planning and Continuous Cover Forestry

Forest planning requires unbiased and sufficient information on current forest resources, their anticipated dynamics under different management scenarios, and the objectives of the decision maker. Forest planning systems need to be adapted to improve their potential to deal with continuous cover forestry (CCF). The current forest planning systems and associated models can be adapted to group systems by treating each group as a separate calculation unit. In the selection system, currently available growth models may not realistically describe the growth reaction of trees, which causes additional uncertainty in forest-planning calculations. Furthermore, field-data collection based on airborne laser scanning alone is not sufficient for planning of CCF, and additional field measurements are needed. Tree-level measurements by drones open interesting opportunities for forest planning, which might be especially useful under CCF.