Towards the Sustainable use of Europe's forests - the missing elements

1. Towards the Sustainable use of Europe's forests • - the missing elements • Keith Rennolls, University of Greenwich, U.K. (k.rennolls@gre.ac.uk) • This workshop, “Towards the sustainable use of Europe's forests” with sub-title “Forest ecosystem and landscape research: scientific challenges and opportunities” lists three fundamental substantive areas of research that are involved: • Forest management and practices, • Ecosystem processes and functional ecology, and • Environmental economics and sociology. • But, there are essential catalytic elements missing! Without these elements there is great danger that the aimed for multi-disciplinary scientific management of Europe’s forests will become just another poorly planned and failed experiment. • What are the missing elements? Perhaps it will become obvious if we examine some aspects of the named fundamental substantive research areas: • Forest management and practices :- germination, seedling, weeding, fertilisation … experiments to determine best practice; forest inventory and surveys for timber, NTFPs, medicinal species, diversity, … ; use of thematic classification techniques for land-use mapping; forest mensuration, growth and yield modelling ; production forecasting; management of uncertainty and determination of accuracy and error measures. • Ecosystem processes and functional ecology :- characterisation of populations and processes, by indices and measures/metrics, their spatial interactions, and their temporal dynamics by multi-scale models ; fitting of models to experimental and field survey data; sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. • Environmental economics and sociology :-surveys of forest timber and NTFRs, social capital and social networks ; socio-economic modelling of the interactions between natural and social resources from such data ; optimising intervention strategies ; econometrics. • The missing elements of the proposed NoE would seem to be clear: • 1. Statistics (Biometrics) is the discipline which grew out of the biological, social and economic sciences as the very means by which these disciplines were able to become quantitative scientific disciplines. Statistics is the key methodology for the design and analysis of all scientific experiments and surveys; for dealing with errors and uncertainty; for fitting models to data. • 2. Modelling (including OR and Optimisation) is the mathematically-based approach to representing nature, in all its aspects (e.g. forest growth, population structure and diversity, social networks, or econometric models), with computer software implementation to simulate and forecast behaviour. • 3. Informetrics. The current scientific age is also the age of electronic data-collection, data warehouses, data-mining, the web, the grid. That is, of Informatics : a methodological discipline that clearly should be included in any major scientific endeavour. • Statistics, Modelling and Informatics (“SMI”) are absolutely crucial elements of the proposed NoE in Forestry and the Environment (“FE”) if the outcomes are to be of world-beating quality. • The “SMIFE” proposal is that a formalized infrastructure of European Institutes and experts be established, which is concerned with the full and efficient development and use SMI in the Forest and Environmental Sciences (FE), and that this should be included in the currently proposed NoE for the Sustainable use of Europe's forests. Please contact the author if you strongly agree or strongly disagree! • See: http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/research/cassm/smife for more details on the SMIFE concept. • See: http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/conferences/iufro/proceedings for examples of SMIFE contributions. • See: http://www.fbmis.info/ for a free on-line journal: Forest Biometry, Modelling and Information Sciences