Management of Multi-scale Forest Resource Data over Time: Time and Scale in Forestry

During the last decades there has been a global shiftin forest management from a focus solely on timber management to ecosystem management that endorses all aspects of forest functions: ecological, economic and social. This hasresulted in a shift in paradigm from sustained yield to sustaineddiversity of values, goods and benefits obtained at the same time,introducing new temporal and spatial scales into forest resourcemanagement. This book present methods that enable spatial andtemporal scales to be introduced into the storage, processing, accessand utilization of forest resource data. The methods developed arebased on a conceptual view of a forest as a hierarchicallynested collection of objects that can have a dynamically changing set ofattributes. The temporal aspect of the methods consists of lifetimemanagement for the objects and their attributes and of a temporalsuccession linking the objects together. The method presented isextensible and configurable with regards to the data content and model calculations, allowing for a diverse set ofprocessing operations to be executed using the presented framework.