Elaboration of implementation assumptions for ICP monitoring system in Georgia

Project description

The Project is co-financed by the Polish development cooperation programme 2011 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.

Project goals

The project complements to the activities carried out in 2009 and 2010 as a part of projects financed by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs “Introduction to elaboration of comprehensive basics to forest management in the Georgia’s Racha region” and “Elaboration of concept of forestry management model in Georgia by example of the Racha region”. It responds to the needs of the Georgian Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, which has decided to expand the efforts to reform the country’s forestry by an extremely important element, which is a biological monitoring of forest condition. The Ministry of Environment Protection and Natural Resources of Georgia decided to rely on the widely implemented in Europe the ICP Forests program.

Monitoring of the forests health conditions is based on a network of permanent observational plots (SOP) with different objectives, surface size, range of measurements and observations. The first level are the permanent observational plots LEVEL I arranged in a regular order of the network 16 x 16 km (density in force in the ICP Forests) or more dense, which is the national network, depending on the degree of forests’ differentiation in a given country. The purpose of observations and measurements on these plots is to assess the health status of forests, watching its variability over time and regional differentiation. Observation of the morphological characteristics of tree crowns, the symptoms and causes of sample trees damage is held annually during the growing season.
A concept of the project is based on the recommendations of ICP Forests and contains the following elements: the design phase, phase of the purchase of hardware and software, staff training phase, the phase of establishment of permanent observational plots, conducting observations, as well as the phase of creating a database, elaborating reports on the forests’ state and transfering data to the ICP-Forests.
The proposed to the Georgian side solution will become a base to initiate and continue the actions of implementing the ICP Forest systems in Georgia.

Characteristics of the project

Scope of IBL participation

Project contractors

Department of Forest Management
dr inż. Grzegorz Zajączkowski

Department of Silviculture and Genetics
mgr inż. Piotr Zajączkowski

Partners