Forest Stand Growth Models: What For?

Until very recently foresters have relied on infrequent inventories to provide static descriptions of large forest areas for management planning. With the quantum increases in computing power, the massing of forestry data, and the increasing pressure for effective management planning, it is becoming necessary to view the forest as dynamic, and subject to manipulation for management purposes. Prediction of changes to forest structure and yield must be made to update old data and project stands into the future. This paper reviews the current sources of literature on growth and yield, discusses basic types and components of growth models, and gives some examples of important uses for growth and yield models. The future will see increased use of computers for analysis of forestry data including even more sophisticated growth and yield models linked to both inventory and decision making processes.