Activities

SIMWOOD is a very practice-oriented project, promoting direct and joint forest governance and collaboration. It gathers best practices on sustainable harvesting techniques, good approaches for multifunctional management, modelling tools for owners to estimate the evolution of their forest stands, etc. The project team have worked on regional pilot initiatives in 18 European regions and established Regional Learning Labs (RLL) to ensure a broad stakeholder involvement on the project. The RLL reinforce the bottom- up approach of the SIMWOOD research activities.

One of the tools available for non-technical end-users is FlorNExT® to simulate growth or thinnings in certain pine and oak stands

Additional information

The FlorNExT® application helps forest owners to better manage their forests by providing technical advice via two tools: the first one forecasts the growth of the forest stands, giving an estimate of the future volume and quality of the wood. The second application is a growth simulator that helps to design thinnings. The tools can be applied for Pinus pinaster and Quercus pyrenaica in North-Eastern Portugal. Target users of FlorNExT® are small forest owners and enterprises.

The starting point of both tools is a short description of the current status of the woodland. Basic entry data are the species, current age, dominant height, density and average diameter of the trees and the number of years to simulate. Not all data are necessary.

In the growth simulator, the result of the forecast is a table showing the yearly estimate of the wood production. Additionally, depending on the results and average growth, the application might advise when a thinning or a final cut is recommended so as to maximise the profit.

If a thinning is advisable, the growth simulator allows to directly switch to the thinning forecast tool, which displays details of the appropriate thinning plan. In this case the outcome is a graph and table indicating the volume of timber to be extracted and how to do it (number of trees of each diameter to be cut).

If the users wishes to directly use the thinning simulator to test different management plans, they must provide the same basic data. In addition, if an idea of the approximate number of trees to be removed is already available, this can be indicated in the application. The result (table and graph) will again provide the evolution of the stand and how the thinning should be performed.

Tools are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.