European Forest Institute Research Reports – serie

Over the past two decades various European forest information projects have had the vision to build a distributed Europe forest information network, in which existing data can be identified and made available to a community of users. One of these projects was the Network for a European Forest Information Service (NEFIS). It ran from 2003 to 2005. The results of NEFIS are the subject of this report. The project explored an overall information system architecture based on existing data reporting structures at national, EU and international levels. Development of a metadata schema to enable discovery of resources was a second important step. An advanced demonstration version of a European forest information system was developed. It consists of three main components: (1) resource discovery catalogue based on the NEFIS metadata schema; (2) a visualization toolkit allowing for exploratory data analysis; and (3) a remote search demonstrator presenting an example of how distributed data sets can be identified, compiled and analysed. The example of the remote search used forest inventory data from six European countries. The report includes a set of considerations for the development of an operational forest information system. More information on the project outputs can be found at www.efi.int (search for nefis).

Forest growth in Europe has been increasing during the last decades. The possible causes suggested to explain this have been increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, improved temperature and precipitation climate, increasing nitrogen deposition and better management. In this book complementary approaches are used to discriminate between the importance of each of these factors. Investigations over large geographical areas are used to separate current variability while detailed studies of the growth of individual trees allow historical trends to be evaluated. Four different mechanistic forest ecosystem models supplement the empirical investigations. The major cause of the observed growth increase is attributed to the increased nitrogen availability. In future, direct temperature effects and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration are likely to become important determinants of forest growth. Anyone interested in the future of production and health of Europe's forests should benefit form this extensive analysis of the current status and projections of forest growth.