Forest management economics based on forest typology

Abstract In forest management, natural conditions have long been systemized by groups of forest habitat types (GFHT). Based on them, appropriate economic measures can be taken and economic efficiency of silviculture calculated. Management intensity, the term related only to timber production in the past, has recently been defined more broadly within the sustainable, close-to-nature forest management concept. It includes economic-ecological and efficient management, and reflects potential production as well as ecological effects of forest stands. Nature and natural development are preferred where artificial interventions are unnecessary (Plíva 2000). This concept uses a specific GFHT as the elementary unit as it allows to exactly identify ecological and economic potential, management measures, quantification and monetary expression of elementary components of economic efficiency. Such optimization of management measures and their economic projections analysis can be considered a comprehensive biological-ecological-economic analysis.