Development Of A Supporting System Of Target Tree Oriented Stand Operation For Practice Of Close-to-natural Forest Management

A fundamental difference between close-to-nature forestry and plantation forestry is the stand operation systems featured with decision parameters of how to cut trees in stand, and with or without the target tree design is a key element in between. Principles of target tree oriented operation are: (1) classifying all trees in stand into 4 classes labeled as target trees, ecological valuable trees, disturbing trees and other normal trees. (2) Reducing costs and elevating productivities of stand operation, (3) Felling of disturbing trees with consideration of protecting of natural regeneration. All these works must be done according to the biological and ecological relationships, such as vigorous, stem quality and biodiversity, between single trees in the stand, and the result may vary from different stand condition. These characters ask for a high technical and financial consume for conducting the stand operation, and a Supporting System of Target Tree Oriented Stand Operation will therefore help its implementation in an efficient and standardized way. This paper introduces works of development of the target tree operation supporting system, using data of plots collected from our experimental areas for close-to-natural forest management study in the natural and plantation forest regions, design of system concept based on object-oriented method and C/S structured programming in Visual Basic 6.0 in combine with Access for data management and Excel for results output. The system realized virtual and visualizing stand thinning operation according to the target tree principles, and gives out most expected statistics results for tree classification and its spatial distribution map, stand tables before and after the thinning harvest. Analyses of some important management parameters and data management function are also provided in the system.