Forest Structure and Diversity

This contribution presents methods that can be used to describe and analyse forest structure and diversity with particular reference to CCF management. Despite advances in remote sensing, mapped tree data in large observation windows are very rarely available in CCF management situations. Thus, although we present methods of second order statistics (SOC), the emphasis is on nearest neighbor statistics (NNS). The first section gives a general introduction and lists the objectives of the chapter. Methods of analysing non-spatial structure and diversity are presented in the second section. The third section introduces procedures for analysing unmarked and marked patterns of forest structure and diversity. Relevant R codes are provided to facilitate application of the methods. Examples of measuring differences between patterns and of reconstructing forests from samples are also presented. Finally, in Sect. 4 we discuss some important issues and summarize the main findings of this chapter.