De la nécessité d'un inventaire forestier écologique

To meet our growing needs for wood products will require several million dollars of investment in forest management without assured success, unless we have an appropriate knowledge of forest ecosystems.This paper proposes a simple approach to laying down an "ecological" forest map. Physical habitats which can be related to landform, position on the slope, drainage, etc., within an ecological region, are mapped with their actual stands. This approach leads to a rapid classification and mapping of the different forest ecosystems. It is then possible to work out different chronological sequences or seres by relating the stands occupying similar habitats. Knowledge of seres and of actual stand allows the manager to foresee the evolution of a particular stand. In the same way, by the integrated mapping of forest stands and physical habitats, results of sylvicultural treatments can be related to habitat factors, and subsequently can be applied to similar ecosystems.Added costs of mapping data relative to habitats are rapidly compensated by avoiding costly management errors. Furthermore, the supplementary exercise of determining the habitat increases the precision of photo interpretation for stand mapping. The cost is also compensated by the fact that map contours are permanent since they are based on natural and stable features. Only vegetation data will have to be brought up to date periodically.