How have our forests changed already?

Region - The forests are changing, this can be observed over a large area in Bavaria: storms, heat, drought and, last but not least, insect pests leave clear traces.

These changes concern not only forest owners and foresters, but also politics and society.

The fourth federal forest inventory is now to find out to what extent the change has already taken place.

For a few days, this inventory has also been taking place in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen district in the area of ​​the Office for Food, Agriculture and Forests (AELF). Christoph Riedel and Felix Bierling are two of a total of 19 specially trained foresters at the Bavarian State Institute for Forests and Forestry who collect the data for the fourth Federal Forest Inventory (BWI) over a two-year period. The two foresters collect the forest data at the sampling points in Upper Bavaria. Equipped with a large number of measuring devices, the trees are measured and evaluated. Tree species, diameter, height and age are just a few of around 150 parameters.

The regeneration, the ground vegetation or parameters relevant to nature conservation such as dead wood, biotope tree features, structural diversity or forest habitat types are also recorded and assessed. The inventory points are on a grid of 4 x 4 kilometers. If such an inventory point is in the forest, it will be visited by the foresters for the recordings. In the whole of Bavaria, around 8,000 such inventory points are to be recorded according to national recording instructions. More than 100,000 trees are measured. Across Bavaria, the admission phase will take around two years, in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen district the foresters will be on the road for several more weeks. After the recordings are completed at the end of 2022, the extensive data will be evaluated, analyzed and processed.The inventory results should provide information about the development of the tree species composition, the age, the wood supply, its growth and use, but also about the structural and species diversity and the condition of the entire forest ecosystem and habitat and its development. kb