Bücher der Reihe Forestry Sciences

This book provides up-to-date information on the environmental impact of transgenic trees on genetically modified tree (GMT) communication strategy. It is useful to public/private organisations as well as to private and public research bodies and universities worldwide since it reports on the global status of GMT research and policy.

Considering endophyte diversity and the range of various compounds and enzymes they can produce, endophytes can be used for various biotechnological applications.

In 1996 a major six-year research programme, 'Economic Optimisation of Multiple-Use Forestry and Other Natural Resources' was implemented at Department of Economics and Natural Resources, The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (KVL), Copenhagen. The research is funded by KVL; The Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Research Council; The Danish Research Academy; The Danish Forest and Landscape Institute; The Danish Forest and Nature Agency; and The Danish Environmental Protection Agency. The overall objective of the research programme is to enhance the economic theory of sustainable multiple-use forestry and landscape management planning. Emphasis is on decision-making ! management planning from an economic point of view, the basic criterion being rationality as implemented by application of Operations Research methods with regard to sustainable and multiple use of forests and other natural resources in the landscape. The research programme benefits from collaboration agreements with University of California at Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Oregon State University, Department of Forest Resources. As part of the research programme, a second international conference and workshop was held 6 - 12 August, 1998 at KVL, with the title: '2nd Berkeley-KVL Conference on Natural Resource Management -Design and Implementation of Multiple-Use Management'. This event was financed by The Danish Research Academy. Some of the papers presented were selected for peer-reviewing and subsequent publishing. The outcome is the present book in which no paper has been previously published.

One of the first priority areas among joint East/West research programs is the rational use of natural resources and sustainable development of regions. In the boreal zone of North America and Eurasia forests are economically very important and, at the same time highly vulnerable to disturbances. Because of its size and ecological functions the boreal forest zone and its most dynamic disturbance factor - fire - play an important role in ecosystem processes on global scale. Interest within the global change research community in Northern Eurasia (Fennoscandia, European Russia, Siberia, and the Far East of Russia) has grown dramatically in the last few years. It is a vast area about which very little is known. It is a region where temperature rise due to anthropogenic climate forcing is predicted to be the greatest, and where the consequent feedbacks to the atmosphere are potentially large. In addition, it is poised to undergo rapid economic development, which may lead to large and significant changes to its land cover. Much of this interest in Northern Eurasia, as in the high latitude regions in general, is centerd on its role in the global carbon cycle, which is likely to be significantly affected under global change. New research initiatives between Western and Eastern countries have been designed to address a series of phenomena, problems and management solutions.

Large areas of the warm, humid tropics in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are hilly or mountainous. Jackson and Scherr (1995) estimate that these tropical hillside areas are inhabited by 500 million people, or one-tenth of the current world population, many of whom practice subsistence agriculture. The region most affected is Asia which has the lowest area of arable land per capita. Aside from limited areas of irrigated terraces, most of the sloping land, which constitutes 60% to 90% of the land resources in many Southeast Asian countries, has been by-passed in the economic development of the region (Maglinao and Hashim, 1993). Poverty in these areas is often high, in contrast to the relative wealth of irri- gated rice farms in lowland areas that benefited from the green revolution. Rapid population growth in some countries is also exacerbating the problems of hillside areas. Increasingly, people are migrating from high-potential lowland areas where land is scarce to more remote hillside areas. Such migra- tion, together with inherent high population growth, is forcing a transforma- tion in land use from subsistence to permanent agriculture on fragile slopes, and is creating a new suite of social, economic, and environmental problems (Garrity, 1993; Maglinao and Hashim, 1993).

Forests represent a remnant wilderness of high recreational value in the densely populated industrial societies, a threatened natural resource in some regions of the world and a renewable reservoir of essential raw materials for the wood processing industry. In June 1992 the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro initiated a world-wide process of negotiation with the aim of ensuring sustainable management, conservation and development of forest resources. Although there seems to be unanimous support for sustainable development from all quarters, there is no generally accepted set of indicators which allows comparisons to be made between a given situation and a desirable one. In a recent summary paper prepared by the FAO Forestry and Planning Division, Ljungman et al. (1999) find that forest resources continue to diminish, while being called upon to produce a greater range of goods and services and that calls for sustainable forest management will simply go unheeded if the legal, policy and administrative environment do not effectively control undesirable practices. Does the concept of sustainable forest management represent not much more than a magic formula for achieving consensus, a vague idea which makes it difficult to match action to rhetoric? The concept of sustainable forest management is likely to remain an imprecise one, but we can contribute to avoiding management practices that are clearly unsustainable.

Proceedings of a Seminar on the Practical Applications of Remote Sensing in Forestry, Jönköping, May 1985, under the Auspices of the Joint FAO/ECE Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics and the Swedish National Board of Forestry under the Ministry of Agriculture