peer-reviewedInterest is growing in Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF) as a management approach among private
forest owners in Ireland. Developments in forest policy are directed at promoting CCF as a means of
enhancing forest resilience, sustaining forest production and delivering diverse ecosystem services.
In 2019 the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) introduced a new pilot
funding measure to support the adoption of CCF management in suitable private forests. Currently
the area of forest under CCF management is relatively small (estimated at around 1% of the total
forest area) and several barriers to wider adoption have been identified. These include the lack of
a simple template for the transformation of planted forests to CCF and a monitoring protocol with
known inventory costs and outputs. In this study three inventory protocols were compared in terms
of their ease of use, the types of data outputs and cost effectiveness in a forest stand at an early stage
of transformation to CCF. These protocols were compared to a complete enumeration approach.
The inventory protocols being tested were developed by the UK Forestry Commission (FCIN45), a
group of French and Belgian researchers (VISUAL) and the Irregular Silviculture Network (ISN).
Results indicate that by using modern technology and careful design, a cost-effective inventory
protocol can be implemented to collect information of sufficient accuracy to inform management
decisions. Advantages and limitations of each protocol are discussed. The ultimate outcome would
be the development and adoption of a common inventory and monitoring approach to enable private
owners to critically compare stand management and performance. This is essential to support and
guide forest managers and forest owners during the transformation process