Design concepts adopted in long-term forest monitoring programs in Europe--problems for the future?

摘要: Long-term intensive monitoring in Europe is presently proceeding more than 800 plots, where a number of investigations are carried out according to allegedly standardized protocols. While the potential program cannot be denied, certain aspects that binding for data analysis may source problems future evaluation results. Here it argued that: (i) current biological response indicators adopted by will not permit air pollution effects distinguished from due other stressors and/or natural variation; (ii) sampling strategy select sites does enable European scale estimates status attributes interest or their changes; and (iii) tactic suggested at plot level ambiguous provide representative, unbiased scale. This latter point implies consequences when plot-level used models, correlative studies infer cause-effect relationships.