European forest types for biodiversity assessment - Quantitative approaches

Future monitoring of European forests and their biodiversity is most logically based onquantitative surveys and it is practical if existing survey systems are modified for this purpose. We analyse quantitative data from two different types of survey that cover most of Europe: 1) National forest inventories and 2) ICP Forests Level 1 data. National forest inventory data were pooled at the scale of regional administrative units to generate a relatively homogeneous data set of percentage tree species composition. These data were
classified using clustering routines to generate a set of major European forest types. The quantitative approach is considerably influenced by plantations of limited biodiversity and has difficulty resolving rare forest types of high diversity (e.g. floodplain forests), so a combination of approaches is desirable to faithfully describe European forest biodiversity.