Belarusian Polish Forest Mapping Belarusian Polish Forest Mapping

Belarusian-Polish Forest Mapping project
Contents
Contents ........................................................................................................................................... 3
Summary .......................................................................................................................................... 4
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 5
1.1. What is the Belarusian-Polish Forest Mapping project? .................................................. 5
1.2. High Conservation Value Forests, Important Bird and Plant Areas, Woodland Key
Habitats ........................................................................................................................................ 5
1.3. Necessary conditions ensuring forest biodiversity conservation ...................................... 6
1.4. Current state and protection of forests in Europe; why were Belarus and Poland
included in the Forest Mapping program? ................................................................................... 7
2. Belarusian-Polish Forest Mapping project methodology ........................................................ 8
2.1. Project organization .......................................................................................................... 8
2.2. Material and methods ........................................................................................................ 8
2.2.1. Forest types adopted in this project .......................................................................... 9
2.2.2. List of BIF criteria ................................................................................................... 10
2.2.3. Methodological justification of the selection criteria.............................................. 12
2.3. Source data ...................................................................................................................... 15
2.4. Structure of the BIF database .......................................................................................... 17
3. Results of the project ............................................................................................................. 19
3.1. BIFs by ownership categories ......................................................................................... 19
3.2. BIFs by forest types ........................................................................................................ 21
3.3. BIFs by criteria ............................................................................................................... 25
3.4. Analysis of the spatial structure of BIFs ......................................................................... 31
3.5. Felling rate of BIFs ......................................................................................................... 35
3.6. BIFs versus existent protected areas ............................................................................... 38
3.7. BIFs versus NATURA 2000 sites ................................................................................... 44
3.8. Reliability and interpretation of the results ..................................................................... 46
4. DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................ 49
4.1. Belarusian-Polish Forest Mapping – a module of mapping of European Biologically
Important Forests ....................................................................................................................... 49
4.2. Quality of source data and its effect on results of this project ........................................ 51
4.3. Applying the results of the BPFM project ...................................................................... 51
4.4. Major conservation goals identified in this project ........................................................ 52
5. Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... 54
6. CONTACTS .......................................................................................................................... 55
7. REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 56
ANNEX 1. General outline: characteristics, management, and protection of forests ................... 58
ANNEX 2. Country-specific section criteria ................................................................................. 62
ANNEX 3. Classification of the existent forms of forest protection in the BPFM project ........... 68
ANNEX 4 The distribution of BIFs in project area………………………………………...…inset
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