During the last decades there has been a global shift
in forest
management from a focus solely on timber management to
ecosystem management that endorses all aspects of forest
functions: ecological, economic and social. This has
resulted in a
shift in paradigm from sustained yield to sustained
diversity of
values, goods and benefits obtained at the same time,
introducing
new temporal and spatial scales into forest resource
management.

This book present methods that enable spatial and
temporal scales
to be introduced into the storage, processing, access
and utilization
of forest resource data. The methods developed are
based on a
conceptual view of a forest as a hierarchically
nested collection of
objects that can have a dynamically changing set of
attributes. The
temporal aspect of the methods consists of lifetime
management for
the objects and their attributes and of a temporal
succession linking
the objects together. The method presented is
extensible and
configurable with regards to the data content and model
calculations, allowing for a diverse set of
processing operations to
be executed using the presented framework.