Forest planning as the most important aspect of sustainable forest management

Forest planning is the most important condition for sustainable, continuous, economically efficient and ecological forest use. In North-West Russia, in the Komi Republic in particular, the increasing role of forest planning is based on the obvious need to transfer from the extensive way of forest management and use of primary natural forests to intensive way of secondary reforestated forests management and use. Forest planning in these conditions should provide the required demand in timber under conditions of forest ecological and social importance protection, taking into account the existed spatial structure of the forest fund. Landscape, ecological and economical forest evaluation as a basis for forest planning allows to define secondary forest areas where efficient forestry and economically profitable activities are possible (taking in consideration the pattern structure and spatial heterogeneity of secondary forests, where most of the territory is covered with low-value stands). Forest planning in intensive forestry should be long-term, minimum for one felling rotation period. This requires to work out regional research programmes for forest activities, but allows giving the economical estimation at each stage of forest management, not only by the felling time. Forest planning allows to estimate the costs of forestry activities and to relate to the expected results that are really important for the financial and economical planning at the enterprise. Long-term forest planning guarantees not only economical efficiency, but makes the grounds for forest social and ecological values protection. Forest planning process is dealing with the necessity of various data collection and joint use. Besides forest inventory data, forest planning includes remote sensing data that can guarantee acute and updated information about a certain forest area, allows to specify spatial, age and tree species structure of a forest stand, define a landscape and ecological peculiarities of the planning object, mark high value forests and key biotopes. Modern information technologies based on GIS provide the tools for the complex analysis of information about forests and give opportunities to modeling of expected results and give an opportunity for forest planning to select the optimal way of forest management for a certain place.