Forest inventory and its importance for sustainable forestry development
Authors: Pantić Damjan , Čuković Duško 
Published: April 2024

In modern forestry, comprehensive analyzes are necessary when planning and making decisions. Each decision, directly or indirectly, affects the forest, reflecting through different economic, environmental and social criteria. There is a growing number of elements that planners and decision makers need to consider. This is especially pronounced in the XXI century when forests are endangered by various harmful influences, primarily of anthropogenic origin (direct or indirect), while at the same time functional sustainability and sustainability are imposed as management imperatives. Between these extremes, planners must find such solutions that will increase the degree of forest cover, protect existing forests, improve their quality and functional capacity, while permanently satisfying the increasingly complex requirements of modern society towards forests. The starting point for their action is comprehensive and reliable information on forests at various levels, from local to global. In that sense, the forest inventory is gaining more and more importance and is rapidly developing in the methodological and technological sense, as well as in terms of merging national inventories into various regional and global associations dealing with forests. The aim of these associations is to exchange experiences and create functional databases, which would enable experts to make detailed analyzes and monitoring of forest ecosystems, and politicians, based on these expertises, to make binding decisions for member states. In the time to come, forests have been recognized as a condition for the survival of human civilization, so that forestry is increasingly taking on supranational significance. The forest inventory of BiH, ie the Republika Srpska, until the beginning of the 90s of the 20th century, had all the features of a modern inventory, based on statistical principles. The war and political circumstances after the mentioned period, the lack of finances, scientific research and personnel closely specialized in forest inventory, influenced the decades-long stagnation of the forest inventory of the Republic of Srpska. Stagnation is multidirectional with negative implications for the process of planning and decision-making in forestry, ie with negative impacts on the condition of the forests of Republika Srpska. Forest inventory for the needs of forest management, which is the basic planning document for regulating forest management in the spirit of the principle of continuity of forest management, often does not provide the prescribed accuracy of assessment for broader categories of high forests with natural regeneration at the level of forest areas. Inventory data for lower unit units (departments and sections) are burdened with large estimation errors, so that the executor of the plan at this level is left with the freedom to work, with the management plan prescribed for the management class being executed in full. Reliability and control of the implementation of plans on this concept of forest inventory are debatable. The results of forest inventory on large areas (DIŠ-1 and DIŠ-2) are incomparable due to the different concepts of samples used, improvisation of field work and poor data processing procedures, unrealistic increases in area, volume and volume increment in DIŠ-2, so that relevant conclusions about the forest fund trend over a 40-year period are impossible to draw. A number of measures are proposed in order to overcome this situation, and the RS forest inventory is methodologically, technologically and functionally improved and in line with modern European inventories. The imperative measure is to provide scientific staff specialized in forest inventory, which would deal with scientific research and professional work in this area, as well as education of staff for the needs of RS forestry. Only after that can we talk about methodological corrections of small-area and national inventory, application of modern technologies and automation of data collection, transfer and processing, creation of information system and inclusion of RS forest inventory in regional and global associations that focus on forests. Without the implementation of these and other measures, the RS forest inventory will continue to stagnate at the level of the 1980s and will be less and less able to meet the numerous demands imposed on modern forestry.