A tool for assessing ecological status of forest ecosystem

Managers and policy makers are beginning to appreciate the value of ecological monitoring of artificially regenerated forest especially in urban areas. With the advent of more advance technology in precision forestry, high resolution remotely sensed data e.g. hyperspectral and LiDAR are becoming available for rapid and precise assessment of the forest condition. An assessment of ecological status of forest ecosystem was developed and tested using FRIM campus forest stand. The forest consisted of three major blocks; the old growth artificially regenerated native species forests, naturally regenerated forest and recent planted forest for commercial timber and other forest products. Our aim is to assess the ecological status and its proximity to the mature old growth artificially regenerated stand. We used airborne LiDAR, orthophoto and thirty field sampling quadrats of 20x20m for ground verification. The parameter assessments were grouped into four broad categories: a. forest community level-composition, structures, function; landscape structures-road network and forest edges. A metric of parameters and rating criteria was introduced as indicators of the forest ecological status. We applied multi-criteria assessment to categorize the ecological status of the forest stand. The paper demonstrates the application of the assessment approach using FRIM campus forest as its first case study. Its potential application to both artificially and naturally regenerated forest in the variety of Malaysian landscape is discussed