Identification of Biodiversity and Other Forest Attributes for Sustainable Forest Management: Siberian Forest Case Study

This paper attempts to identify characteristics of biodiversity and other (forest) ecosystem conditions that are considered essential for a description of ecosystem functioning and development of sustainable forest management practices in the Siberian forests. This is accomplished through an analysis of net primary production of phytomass (NPP) which acts as a proxy for ecosystem functioning. Rough Sets (RS) analysis is applied to study the Siberian ecoregions classified into compact and cohesive NPP performance classes. Through a heuristic procedure, a reduced set of attributes is generated for a NPP classification problem. In order to interpret relationships between various forest characteristics, so-called "interesting rules" are generated on a basis of reduced problem description. These "interesting rules" provide means to draw conclusions in the form of knowledge statements about functioning of the Siberian forests