Hopp til hovedinnholdet

Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2012

Abstract

Growth conditions in Fennoscandia are characterized by relatively short growth seasons and cold winters, from 130 growth days (T 5C) in the far north high mountains to more than 200 in south Sweden and Norway. Growth models from different regions predict different forest growth.In this study, we compare some models commonly applied in forest growth prognosis in pure even aged stands of Norway spruce, Scots pine and birch in Finland, Sweden and Norway. The objectives is to identify behavioural properties, accuracy and bias in selected Nordic growth models using a wide-ranging test data set from permanent research plots in Norway.Present tentative conclusions about the accuracy of growth outside the geographical range of the original base materials. With four different response variables in the tested models we emphasized relative deviations rather than absolute values as most suitable for comparisons. The models were compared by statistical tests, a visual inspection of the smoothed curve of the relative deviations in different stand properties and ranked due to their performance.We observed site index, stand density and mean tree size as the three main components in the models. For Norway spruce a basal area increment model from Sweden had the lowest standard deviation with 23 %. The mean R2 between residuals and stand characteristics from this model was also low (1.3 %), which indicates that variables are well included in the model. For Scots pine and birch, Finnish percent volume growth models showed the best fit to the Norwegian test data, with a R2 between residuals and stand characteristics of 2.8 and 6.7 %, respectively. Several of the models from Sweden and Finland predict the growth as well as stand models frequently in use in Norway.