European forest types for coppice forests in Croatia

Abstract

Coppice forests in South-Eastern Europe (SEE) cover a broad range of ecological conditions. So far approaches to structure the variety of coppice forests were either highly aggregated or relied on very specific local to regional phytocoenological classification systems which defy a coherent comparison between SEE countries and at European level. To bridge this gap this article presents a methodological approach to allocate current coppice forests in SEE to European forest types (EFT) using readily available information. The approach is presented by means of the example of Croatia, a country that shares many common features with other countries in SEE with regard to biogeographical and vegetation diversity of forests, but also with regard to the currently used methods for assessment of national forest resources and coppice forests in particular. In the presented approach the map of natural vegetation of Europe (Bohn et al., 2004) is combined with the area of regional forest offices (RFO), the forest area of Corine 2000 land cover map, and the area distribution of 12 coppice management classes within RFOs. Within each RFO, coppice management classes are linked with occurring EFTs. If more than one EFT could be linked with a particular coppice management class, random distribution of coppice forests over eligible EFTs is assumed. In total 499.687 ha (93.6% of the total coppice area) were classified, whereof for 76.4% the classification to EFTs was possible with high confidence, in other cases an approximation was made based on the available information. The presented methodology appears useful for a rapid stratification of coppice forest resources by the combined use of currently available national data on coppice forests in countries of the SEE region and available data sets at European level. As soon as plot-level national forest inventory data becomes available an evaluation and eventual improvement of the approach will be possible.