Forest monitoring
The basis of sustainable forest management and nature resources exploitation is a system of forest inventory . The legal status of the forest inventory and its content are defined are defined by "The Forest code", which establishes that forest management and forest exploitation without forest inventory are prohibited. It emphasizes the special importance of forest inventory in the system of forestry , determined by the state ownership of forests.
Information on forest fund of the republic, monitoring of dynamics of the happening changes in the forests of all forest fund holders, design and calculations of rational, long and inexhaustible use of the wood – all this is the sphere of responsibility of forest inventory which is represented by the Republican Unitary Enterprise "Belgosles".
The enterprise has a forwarding structure with various subdivisions including forest engineers, tax specialists, soil scientists, forest pathologists, forest monitoring specialists, programmers, cartographers, etc. Annually in Belarus, forest inventory and other forest management works are carried out on an area of about 1 million hectares of forest fund. In addition, Belarusian specialists work in several regions of Russia - Transbaikal, Novgorod, Smolensk and other regions.
The technical basis of forest inventory are aerospace survey materials. At the forest management enterprise the station of reception of space information is established, research works on development of technology of application of space shootings of the woods on various thematic directions are performed.
Data processing, derived from aerospace imagery, and data forwarding field surveys of forests are performed with the use of specialized software and geographic information systems with the compilation of thematic digital maps and calculations on the use and reproduction of forests for different periods of time with a forecast of up to 100 years.
The monitoring system of the forests of the Republic of Belarus
Forest monitoring has been carried out in Belarus since 1989 by the specialized service of the Ministry of Forestry on the raster National Network for Pan-European Technology. The national forest monitoring network includes 1,450 permanent counting stations (PCSs) and 80 permanent trial plots (PTPs). Permanent counting stations are evenly distributed throughout the republic. Within the framework of the ecological forest monitoring carried out on this network by the ICP Forests methodology, about 40 thousand trees are examined annually on the PCSs and the PTPs.
Depending on the purposes and solvable tasks, monitoring of the woods is carried out in the following directions:
- monitoring of the impact of air pollution on forests (ecological forest monitoring);
- forest pathological monitoring;
- radiation monitoring of forests;
- ecological-meliorative monitoring of reclaimed forest lands;
- local-object forest monitoring.
Based on the needs of the republican government bodies and other interested parties, other areas of forest monitoring can be implemented.