Influences of Forest Management on Roe Deer Habitat Quality

Inherent in most European forest management plans is the underlying requirement of resource sustainability. The concept of sustainable resource management forces forest managers to evaluate the future long term effects of management decisions made today and to select those which achieve defined resource management goals. One of the key factors needed to manage roe deer is knowledge of the structure of the vegetation (including the herb, forb and shrub layers) over time, both at a stand level and spatially. The difficulty is in assessing the habitat quality, which must be known spatially and temporally. For forests with trees above a minimum breast height diameter, there are already a number of individual tree growth models available which can provide information regarding tree growth over time. One of the results of the Special Research Program (SRP), "Forest Ecosystem Restoration" SFB-008 (Project Part 4, Project Part 9), was the development of as series of empirical understory vegetation models (Bokalo 2001). These models were developed in such a manner that they could be directly linked to a forest growth and yield model, for the purpose of predicting future habitat suitability indices for roe deer. The first objective of this project is to regionally validate the vegetation models developed by Bokalo (2001) and to determine if they can be improved with the inclusion of spatial information. The second objective of this project is to determine if the models developed by Bokalo (2001), can be used to predict wildlife habitat suitability indices for roe deer, both temporally and spatially, on an independent dataset. The third objective of this project is to test whether or not the models developed are sufficiently sensitive to respond and depict the effects of different management strategies on Habitat Suitability Indices.