Multipurpose National Forest Inventory in Mongolia, 2014-2017 -A tool to support sustainable forest management

Dan Altrell

doi:10.24057/2071-9388-2019-36

Abstract

Mongolia’s first Multipurpose National Forest Inventory, 2014-2017, was implemented by the Forest Research and Development Centre, in collaboration with international expertise and the country’s main forestry institutions, universities and research organisations.The long-term objective of the multipurpose NFI is to promote sustainable management of forestry resources in Mongolia, to enhance their social, economic and environmental functions.The NFI findings show that there are 11.3 million hectares of Boreal Forest in Mongolia. 9.5 million hectares are Stocked Boreal Forest Area, of which 69 percent is located outside of protected areas, 4 percent are designated for green-wood utilisation through forest enterprise concessions, and another 16 percent designated for fallen dead-wood collection through forest user group concessions. The non-protected stocked forests (i.e. production forest) have an average growing stock volume of 115 m3 per hectare, compared with an optimal growing stock volume of 237 m3 per hectare, and there is an additional 46.5 m3 of dead wood per hectare. The growing stock age distribution shows that 24 m3 per hectare are over 200 years (i.e. economically over-aged). The main tree species in stocked forest are Larix sibirica (81%), Pinus sibirica (7%), Betula platyphylla (6%) and Pinus sylvestris (5%), of which all, except for P. sibirica, are classified as legally harvestable tree species. Wild fire is the current main environmental factor decreasing the forest tree biomass.The NFI helped identifying priority areas for the forestry sector, and to guide the implementation of sustainable forest management at the local level. The main forest management challenges of Mongolia’s boreal forest will be to address that they are a) under-stocked (less than 50% of production potential), b) over-aged (31% of growing stock volume in stocked production forest is above optimal production age), and c) under-utilised (4% of forest area designated to green-wood utilisation).

Highlights

Mongolia’s first systematic samplebased national forest inventory (NFI) was conducted in 2014-2017 under the lead of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET)
The multipurpose NFI was requested to generate information compatible with the national reporting to UNFCCC and to address the information needs for coherent forest policy development to support sustainable forest management in Mongolia
All reporting from the Multipurpose NFI was done in a transparent manner and the results are published online, at the Forest Research and Development Centre’s web portal http://www.forest-atlas.mn (FRDC 2019)

Summary

Introduction

Mongolia’s first systematic samplebased national forest inventory (NFI) was conducted in 2014-2017 under the lead of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET). The multipurpose NFI was requested to generate information compatible with the national reporting to UNFCCC and to address the information needs for coherent forest policy development to support sustainable forest management in Mongolia. The background to MET’s request was the lack of national-wide holistic forestry information to respond to the many new reporting requirements, and the urgent need to generate necessary baseline information on the status of Mongolia’s boreal forest, and to evaluate the challenges ahead in a changing climate (MET 2019). Existing national-level information on the forestry resources has been derived through compilations of provincial forest assessments, which were based on remote sensing data in combination with ocular inspections (i.e. not objective nor measurement-based) (MET 2019). Other publications on national-level status of ecosystems and their degradation, like the Atlas“Ecosystems of Mongolia”(Vostokova et al 2005) have not been derived through systematic field data collection, but rather through case study areas, so an objective and systematic national level boreal forest inventory would be the first study presenting country-level representative and accurate information on the status of the boreal forest resources and the actual environmental challenges they are facing

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Conclusion