From inventory to consumer biomass availability - the ITOC model

National Forest Inventories (NFIs) provide data that do not directly meet the needs of wood market analysts to evaluate the availability of wood for consumers. While NFIs aim at a comprehensive assessment of forest resources in line with their definitions of forest area, growing stock, increment harvest, etc., wood market analysts are interested in the amount of wood that enters the market and is processed and converted into the various tradable assortments. The ITOC-model seeks to bridge the gap between these two objectives. It is a calculation framework for estimating the utilizable potential of wood resources from forests for different assortments. Starting point of all considerations of wood availability is the potential harvestable volume at a sustainable and annual basis in terms of stem volume. Depending on the respective situation in a country this potential harvestable volume can be regarded to correspond to the gross annual increment (GAI) or to the net annual increment (NAI). NFIs frequently can provide better estimates of the potential harvestable volume that take into account further aspects like particular harvesting restrictions, salvage logging after natural disturbances, management strategies, and age-class distribution of the growing stock and therefore essentially improve the information quality for estimating wood availability. Forest growth model simulations can provide input to the ITOC-model for projections into the future to ascertain the wood availability under defined scenarios. After the starting point is defined as the potential harvestable stem volume as obtained from NFI data or growth model simulations the missing tree components are calculated to obtain the total tree biomass which is regarded as the theoretical potential. In the next step the utilizable part of the potential is calculated by taking into account technical and ecological harvesting restrictions and the various kinds of losses during harvesting operations in the forest and transportation to the mill site. If a minimum of NFI data for a country are available as for example from the Report on the State of Europe’s Forests and the Forest Resources Assessment of the FAO then the ITOC-model can carry out calculations on the basis of these information and several generalized default values. The input data to the ITOC-model may be exchanged in a separate model section by more detailed country-specific data from the countries to obtain enhanced estimates of utilizable potentials. The ITOC-model can handle different levels of detail of input information and thus allows for drawing a pan-European picture of utilizable potentials by taking into account the different information availability from countries.

MANTAU Udo;  GSCHWANTER Thomas;  PALETTO Alessandro;  MAYR Marian L.;  BLANKE Christian;  STRUKOVA Evgeniya;  AVDAGIC A;  CAMIN Paolo;  THIVOLLE-CAZAT Alain;  DÖRING Przemko;  PETRAUSKAS Edmundas;  ENGLERT Hermann;  SCHADAUER Klemens;  BARREIRO Susana;  LANZ Adrian;  VIDAL Claude; 

2019-10-24

SPRINGER FRANCE

JRC94993

1286-4560 (online),   

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13595-016-0582-1,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC94993,   

10.1007/s13595-016-0582-1 (online),