Evaluation of qualitative attributes of forest ecosystems by means of numerical quantifiers

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal of four variants of quantifiers for the numerical expression of qualitative attributes of forest ecosystems, for example site, naturalness, biodiversity, ecological stability, threat of injurious agents, status of forest biotopes of European significance in the NATURA 2000 network and so on. Quantifiers enable to completely characterise the whole set of these qualitative attributes of the ecosystem by one number which directly indicates the relative approximation of the ecosystem (in %) to the required most favourable status. They have more advantages: different numerical operations can be done with them, it is possible to aggregate evaluated units of the ecosystem to larger entities, to determine average value, variability and confidence limits of the final evaluation and to compare resulting statuses mutually or very objectively on the principle of biometric monitoring in a longer time. The construction of quantifiers is opened and it arbitrarily enables to choose input parameters at need (numerical quantifications of ecosystem quality statuses and weights of their criteria and indicators) and to search for optimal solutions. The reaction of quantifiers to different input situations is analysed on model examples and suggestions for their introduction into practice are presented. Special PC software was elaborated for the automated calculation of quantifiers.