Volume 59 (2013): Issue 2 (June 2013)

The paper proposes and justifies an alternative concept of aggregation of forest site types in higher units for purposes of differentiation of forest management. Analysis of variance was performed for both: the natural occurrence of tree species in reserves, as well as the production potential of tree species measured on the representative plots according to Zlatnik´s altitudinal vegetation zones and edaphictrophic series. Based on the results of this analysis, an aggregation of forest site types was suggested along the elevation gradient of climatop, and along the edaphic-trophic and the edaphic-hydric gradients of edaphotop. By intersection of such created 32 categories of geotope with the basic formation groups of forest habitats by Braun-Blanquet geo-botanical school, 53 reconstructive geo-biotopes were formed. The proposed unit was compared using the F-test, Akaike information criterion (AIC), and the index of classification efficiency (EQ) with current typological units in terms of its ability to describe the variability of the analyzed parameters. Finally, the qualitative association of the compared classification models with the European classification systems was assessed. Based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that the site unit geo-biotop is at least comparable with currently used unit MGFT, with the number of categories lower by 72%.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the forest health condition in the area of Hydropower plant Gabčikovo using the digital multispectral aerial images from 2011 in the section Dobrohošt - Sap. We proposed a new innovative procedure of creating the forest mask in the image processing. It concerns a process of defining tree crowns, where we combined subject and raster oriented approach of the image classification. We evaluated forest health condition on a selected forest mask using the method of twophased sampling with regression. The indicators of health condition were tree defoliation and presence of heavily damaged trees and snags in the stands. Defoliation was used to compare the current forest health condition in the concerned area with the data from 2008. Presence of the snags as the result of severe damage is interpreted in terms of stand types related to site conditions. Field survey proved presence of invasive and non-native tree species and plants. Based on the result, we have formulated recommendations for further forest monitoring in the Danube River inundation.