2013 Volume 18 Issue 2 Pages 111-116
The Forest Resource Monitoring Survey (FRMS) started to satisfy not only national requirements but also international ones such as the Montreal Process in 1999. Forest type is an important component from which many indicators of forest biodiversity can be estimated, and the country reports of the Montreal Process must include the forest characteristics of forest types. The current data from FRMS is expected to classify natural forest, but there was almost no data on natural forest types in the second country report of Japan. There are several methods of defining, classifying and identifying forest types and the results differ depending on the method used. Most definitions or classifications of species assemblages and identification of indicators are subjective. This study aimed to classify the forest types of natural FRMS stands and to develop a reproducible classification method. As a result, we classified 74.1% of natural stands which corresponded to climatic area and better than classification of recent country reports, but we could not classify all natural stands.
