Introduction

Jerzy Wawrzoniak

Photo 1. Rowan (Sorbus aukuparia L.) in pine stand - Radziwiłów Forest District by Jerzy Wawrzoniak

Monitoring of the health condition of and the level of threat to forests aimed at reliable forecasting of changes to those two elements is one of the requirements of the State policy on forest in the situation of climatic uncertainty. This postulate is implemented under the forest monitoring programme which has been gathering information on the condition of forests in Poland for over 15 years. The perspectives of development of this programme in the upcoming years are associated with the adjustment of both, the programme structure and measurement ranges of individual components to the recommendations of EU Regulation No. 2152/2003 (Forest Focus) [17] and integration of forest monitoring with the large-scale forest condition inventory. Adjustment of the forest monitoring programme to the recommendations of the Forest Focus Regulation will take place during the development of the National Programme 2005-2006. The Programme's main assumptions consist in a differentiation between the national monitoring level, where tasks resulting from the requirements of forest condition evaluation in the country are implemented, and the European monitoring level, where tasks resulting from the requirements of the Forest Focus Regulation are implemented. This differentiation is needed due to the different detailness level of interpretation of collected data. Forest condition evaluation for national needs requires not only the all-country level information, but also the regional unit level data. Such data should be collected from a plot with grid density 4 x 4 km or 8 x 8 km. Such grid density guarantees the national monitoring programme to be integrated with the large-scale forest condition inventory. The requirement of information about forest condition resulting from the Forest Focus Regulation refers to all-country level and can be implemented in the 16 x 16 km plot grid. Under the developed national forest monitoring programme, the structure and measurement range on second-level level POPs will change. These changes will aim at differentiation of two levels of those plots: national and European. Selected forest monitoring procedures, such as soil monitoring, forest floor vegetation and natural regeneration monitoring, chemistry of assimilatory apparatus monitoring, as well as stand volume and volume increment monitoring should be implemented in the current cycles on the existing, national level, 148 second-level POPs. Of this number, 86 second-level level POPs should belong to the European level where the Forest Focus Regulation's goals are fulfilled.

It is planned that the number of plots, where air pollution and total deposition measurements are taken, will be reduced. Instead of on 148 POPs, measurements would be taken on 10-15 second-level level POPs where an extended programme would be implemented, also including chemical analyses of throughfall waters and soil solutions, as well as meteorological measurements. Such a range of measurements and observations on the second-level level POPs would suit better the recommendations of the Forest Focus Regulation.

Photo 2. Natural regeneration of Scots pine (Pinus silvestris L.) - Skierniewice Forest District - by Jerzy Wawrzoniak

In developing the national forest monitoring programme, attention should be drawn to the necessity to create the possibilities of implementing the new goals set in the Forest Focus Regulation, such as: evaluation of the effect of climatic change on forests, determination of the carbon pool in forests, evaluation of the biological diversity of forest ecosystems or evaluation of the protective functions of forests. Pilot programmes foreseen in the Forest Focus Regulation will be the main tool for developing the rules and methods of including those elements in the monitoring programme. Integration of forest monitoring with large-scale forest inventory will be a priority task under the pilot programmes. The existing large-scale forest condition inventory instruction and the experience gained from its implementation on the Poznań RDSF scale allow attempting to extend it to include all the country. Implementation of this task would make it possible to create in the future a uniform system of collecting information on the condition of forests representing different ownership categories and to make significant savings.