Afforestation and reforestation in Romania: History, current practice and future perspectives

Preserving forest legacy was an important objective throughout Romanian history and so is today. Artificial forest regeneration (including both reforestation and afforestation) was widely used to ensure the forest continuity, following forest harvesting, or to create new forests on non-forest lands. As Romania has undergone various political changes that affected the socio-economic environment, these changes also left significant marks on forest cover dynamics. In this paper, we chronologically present the historical initiatives to preserve and increase forest cover in Romania, the current practices, available funding and future perspectives on artificial forest regeneration. Increasing forest cover from the current level of 27% to, and beyond European average of 33% seems an ambitious target for Romania. However, that may be achievable if the sources of funding for afforestation would diversify and increase, the available funds would be more effectively accessed, national forestry regulations would be less bureaucratic and the guidelines on artificial forest regeneration would be up to date and less restrictive. The whole framework of forestation should be revised to comply with recent social, economic and environmental realities, and modern criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management should be explicitly included. The new goals should also be tailored to the changes regarding the property type, climate related trends and new requirements of the forest certification systems

Abordarea ierarhizata a deciziilor de grup

International audienceThe paper deals with a step-wise analytic hierarchy process (AHP) applied by a group of decision makers wherein nobody has a dominant position and it is unlikely to come to terms with respect to either the weights of different objectives or expected utilities of different alternatives. One of the AHP outcomes, that is the consistency index is computed for each decision maker, for all other decision makers but that one, and for the whole group. Doing so, the group is able to assess to which extent each decision maker alters the group consistency index and a better consistency index could be achieved if the assessment procedure is being resumed by the most influential decision maker in terms of consistency. The main contribution of the new approach is the algorithm presented in as a flow chart where the condition to stop the process might be either a threshold value for the consistency index, or a given number of iterations for the group or decision maker, depending on the degree to which the targeted goal has been decomposed into conflictual objectives

Afforestation and reforestation in Romania: History, current practice and future perspectives

Preserving forest legacy was an important objective throughout Romanian history and so is today. Artificial forest regeneration (including both reforestation and afforestation) was widely used to ensure the forest continuity, following forest harvesting, or to create new forests on non-forest lands. As Romania has undergone various political changes that affected the socio-economic environment, these changes also left significant marks on forest cover dynamics. In this paper, we chronologically present the historical initiatives to preserve and increase forest cover in Romania, the current practices, available funding and future perspectives on artificial forest regeneration. Increasing forest cover from the current level of 27% to, and beyond European average of 33% seems an ambitious target for Romania. However, that may be achievable if the sources of funding for afforestation would diversify and increase, the available funds would be more effectively accessed, national forestry regulations would be less bureaucratic and the guidelines on artificial forest regeneration would be up to date and less restrictive. The whole framework of forestation should be revised to comply with recent social, economic and environmental realities, and modern criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management should be explicitly included. The new goals should also be tailored to the changes regarding the property type, climate related trends and new requirements of the forest certification systems

Combining visual interpretation and image segmentation to derive canopy cover index from high resolution satellite imagery in functionally diverse coniferous forests

Forest canopy cover is one of the most significant structural parameters of the forest stand that can be estimated using of aerial and satellite remote sensing. Even though sub-pixel analysis can be used to estimate the index on low-resolution imagery, high-resolution imagery provides more accurate details on forest canopy variability for ecological and forestry applications. However, the high variability of the images demands a more advanced approach to canopy cover measurement than the visual interpretation of single images or stereo pairs. These traditional methods are inefficient and limited in providing a comprehensive and accurate canopy cover assessment. An improvement of the method could involve classifying high spatial resolution images, separating and extracting the areas corresponding to canopy gaps, and generating canopy cover maps. This study offers valuable insights and reveals key differences between three methods for estimating canopy cover: ground measurements, visual photo interpretation and automatic extraction from classified images using pixel and object-based methods. The texture analysis approach was used for separating the “shadow” objects corresponding to gaps in the canopy from the shades cast on the lower trees. The sample plot-based visual interpretation of the images revealed comparable results between ground and satellite image canopy cover values (correlation coefficient of 0.74 for all plots), with lower correlations (r = 0.39) for uneven-aged stands. The results encourage the use of the texture analysis method, with satisfying accuracy (forest canopy cover differences of maximum 0.06 between ground, photo interpreted and extracted datasets). The method could be further integrated with complementary data like LIDAR or hyperspectral images

Benefit, cost and risk analysis on extending the forest roads network: A case study in Crasna Valley (Romania)

The paper presents how the Analytic Hierarchy Process can be used to select the most suitable combination of new forest roads to build onto a forested area provided that social or ecological aspects are not jeopardized. All important features worth being considered when a new network of forest roads is designed were grouped in three types of criteria, which are benefits, costs and risks. Further, in order to ease the pairwise comparisons between criteria, both benefits and costs have been divided into private and social, while the risks refer to the events that might be triggered or favoured by the construction of new roads, like habitat fragmentation, landslides in case of heavy rainfall during the construction phase or even illegal cuttings. The outcome consists of a series of benefit-cost-and-risk indices and benefit-cost ratios, one for each combination of forest roads, including the status quo. The method has been tested on three combinations of new forest roads already designed for a small forest management unit located in Prahova County, encompassing 838.0 ha of mountainous forest.</p

MASTREE+: Time-series of plant reproductive effort from six continents.

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long-lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a data set that collates reproductive time-series data from across the globe and makes these data freely available to the community. MASTREE+ includes 73,828 georeferenced observations of annual reproduction (e.g. seed and fruit counts) in perennial plant populations worldwide. These observations consist of 5971 population-level time-series from 974 species in 66 countries. The mean and median time-series length is 12.4 and 10 years respectively, and the data set includes 1122 series that extend over at least two decades (≥20 years of observations). For a subset of well-studied species, MASTREE+ includes extensive replication of time-series across geographical and climatic gradients. Here we describe the open-access data set, available as a.csv file, and we introduce an associated web-based app for data exploration. MASTREE+ will provide the basis for improved understanding of the response of long-lived plant reproduction to environmental change. Additionally, MASTREE+ will enable investigation of the ecology and evolution of reproductive strategies in perennial plants, and the role of plant reproduction as a driver of ecosystem dynamics