Abstract

Keywords

Abstract

Switzerland has a long tradition in monitoring forest resources, and today Swiss forests are being monitored by several monitoring programmes. Although the original grid of the Swiss National Forest Inventory served as the basis also for other programmes (e.g. Sanasilva, Biodiversity Monitoring Programme), they are now installed on different sub-grids with only partial overlap, have different frequencies of data collection and different visitation timing within the year. This situation can cause important signals to be missed or not properly quantified.;Swiss AIM is an initiative with the goal to make the existing Swiss forest inventorying and monitoring infrastructures more dynamic, suitable and responsive with respect to current and predicted environmental challenges. Building upon the existing large-scale monitoring networks (e.g. Swiss National Forest Inventory - NFI, Long-term Forest Ecosystem Research - LWF), Swiss AIM will offer a cooperative conceptual and operational framework to support integrated data collection, evaluation, interpretation, analysis and modelling in space and time. The initiative will also support timely reporting about the forest condition in Switzerland.;In this volume, we present the main inputs and outputs of the internal WSL Workshop "Towards an Advanced Inventorying and Monitoring System for the Swiss forest", held virtually on 12 November 2020. Participants at the Swiss AIM Workshop were asked to express their view on the Swiss AIM initiative from several perspectives. They presented scientific questions for a variety of temporal, spatial, environmental and ecological scales: from single sites to the entire country, and from cells to ecosystems. Comprehensive lists of possible measurements and sampling types that build upon the existing ones were also presented. There was a clearly expressed willingness to support the initiative, mainly by providing expertise and organisational support.;This report is structured into three parts, i.e. two main parts and an Annex. Part 1 describes the overarching vision of Swiss AIM and summarizes the ideas and main inputs emerging from the virtual Swiss AIM workshop. Part 2 covers the expression of interest, scientific questions, data requirements and possible contributions from individual Research Units, Programs and Centers.

LWF Classification

Network: LWF,