First year at Univeristy of Göttingen: Module 2

Monitoring of forest resources

 

Course objectives: The course intends to familiarise the students with a range of methods and techniques applied to forest inventories in the preparation, planning, implementation and analysis phase. Objective is that the students are eventually in the position to carry out their own monitoring projects of forests and related resources, and that they know the criteria to judge the quality of monitoring projects in general.

 

Course contents: Forest monitoring is a forestry discipline that aims at the comprehensive and objective characterisation of the forest as a production system and/or as an ecological system in a defined geographic area, in terms of status quo and changes. Forest inventory is the core element of monitoring and generate data and information required by foresters, forest politicians and forest researchers to support decision making. Focus is on the target-oriented planning and the definition of the most appropriate sampling design and plot design that guarantees the generation of high-quality information for the decision makers in forestry. That includes comprehensive presentation of statistical sampling. Examples of small and large area inventories and monitoring are presented and critically analysed. The important remote sensing applications for forest monitoring are not dealt with in detail, as the topic is covered in other courses; but the relevance of integrated inventories (combining field sampling and remote sensing) is addressed. The development of forest inventories towards integrated “landscape inventories”, “multi-resource inventories”, “tree inventories” is also addressed of this course. Prerequisites: Sound basis in “Forest Mensuration” and basic statistics.

 

Teaching and learning methods: This course is taught as a blend of lectures and labs. Lectures deal with the theoretical bases and are implemented in an interactive participatory manner. Labs are conducted on topics where practical skills shall be fostered by student work in the field and in-house. Such labs are organised in groups and with an adequate number of lecturers. The field labs take place in the Göttingen city forest close to the faculty and cover topics of forest mensuration techniques and of field plot establishment. In-house labs are essentially on planning of forest inventory projects and on statistical analysis of sampling-based inventories.

 

Examination: Written exam of 120 minutes

 

Competencies acquired: Familiarise the students with the range of methods and techniques applied to forest monitoring in the preparation, planning, implementation and analysis phase. Objective is that the students are eventually in the position to carry out their own monitoring projects, and that they know the criteria to judge the quality of monitoring projects in general. Focus is on the target-oriented planning and the definition of the most appropriate sampling design and plot design that guarantees the generation of high-quality information for the decision-makers in forestry.