Ukrainian National Forestry University

About: Ukrainian National Forestry University is a education organization based out in Lviv, Ukraine. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Veneer & Old-growth forest. The organization has 188 authors who have published 209 publications receiving 3073 citations.

Contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda.

Abstract: Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework.

Post-Soviet farmland abandonment, forest recovery, and carbon sequestration in western Ukraine

Abstract: Land use is a critical factor in the global carbon cycle, but land-use effects on carbon fluxes are poorly understood in many regions. One such region is Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where land-use intensity decreased substantially after the collapse of socialism, and farmland abandonment and forest expansion have been widespread. Our goal was to examine how land-use trends affected net carbon fluxes in western Ukraine (57 000 km 2 ) and to assess the region’s future carbon sequestration potential. Using satellite-based forest disturbance and farmland abandonment rates from 1988 to 2007, historic forest resource statistics, and a carbon bookkeeping model, we reconstructed carbon fluxes from land use in the 20th century and assessed potential future carbon fluxes until 2100 for a range of forest expansion and logging scenarios. Our results suggested that the low-point in forest cover occurred in the 1920s. Forest expansion between 1930 and 1970 turned the region from a carbon source to a sink, despite intensive logging during socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union created a vast, but currently largely untapped carbon sequestration potential (up to � 150 Tg C in our study region). Future forest expansion will likely maintain or even increase the region’s current sink strength of 1.48 Tg C yr � 1 . This may offer substantial opportunities for offsetting industrial

Forest Structure and Diversity

Abstract: This contribution presents methods that can be used to describe and analyse forest structure and diversity with particular reference to CCF management. Despite advances in remote sensing, mapped tree data in large observation windows are very rarely available in CCF management situations. Thus, although we present methods of second order statistics (SOC), the emphasis is on nearest neighbor statistics (NNS). The first section gives a general introduction and lists the objectives of the chapter. Methods of analysing non-spatial structure and diversity are presented in the second section. The third section introduces procedures for analysing unmarked and marked patterns of forest structure and diversity. Relevant R codes are provided to facilitate application of the methods. Examples of measuring differences between patterns and of reconstructing forests from samples are also presented. Finally, in Sect. 4 we discuss some important issues and summarize the main findings of this chapter.