Abstract
When smallholder farmers establish tree plantations to sell wood to the wood industry, they may run into problems when the plantations are mature and to be marketed because these farmers usually (1) do not know how to estimate the growing stock and (2) do not have sufficient knowledge of the wood markets. In this study, we tackle problem (1) and present stand density management diagrams (SDMDs) as a simple tool that allows rapid estimation of standing volume from data that stem from very basic inventory. Our data come from smallholder plantations in Vietnam, from four communes in the provinces of Binh Dinh and Phu Tho. Immense afforestation activities have been taken place in the country during the past two decades and it is special to Vietnam that a large share of these afforestations are under smallholder management with the goal to generate an additional source of income for these rural poor. A certain type of SDMDs is elaborated for three important exotic tree species commonly used for establishing industrial tree plantations (Acacia hybrid, Acacia mangium and Eucalyptus urophylla). They can be used for volume estimation and are also a tool to guide stand management and silvicultural treatments in general. Both implementation of the inventory and usage of the SDMDs are straightforward and simple so that this tool may be well suited to support smallholders in a better informed marketing of their wood, as well as, a better informed silvicultural management of their plantations.
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Notes
“Planted forests are composed of trees established through planting and/or through deliberate seeding of native or introduced species. Establishment is either through afforestation on land that until then was not classified as forest, or by reforestation of land classified as forest, for instance after a fire or a storm or following clearfelling” (FAO 2010).
Forestry land in Vietnam is defined as (i) “Land of forest cover” and (ii) “land of no forest cover, planned for afforestation”. Consequently, the area of forestry land is with 19.0 Mha higher than the area under forest cover (Clement and Amezaga 2009).
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Acknowledgments
First of all we would like to thank the Advisory Group on International Agricultural Research (BEAF) at the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) within the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation (BMZ) for funding the research project “Strengthening Rural Institutions to Support Livelihood Security for Smallholders Involved in Industrial Tree-planting Programs in Vietnam and Indonesia” (project code R-GOV-176-1-DEU18) within which this study was carried out. We are grateful to the project coordinators at The Centre for International Forest Research, CIFOR, Dr. Chris Barr and Mr. Ahmad Dermawan. And we do highly appreciate the help of FSIV, the Forest Science Institute of Vietnam, for support in implementing the inventory field work. Within FSIV we would like to thank Prof. Nguyen Hoang Nghia and Dr. Pham Duc Chien for the good collaboration during the project years, and of course all the members of the silvicultural group; here especially Mr. Tran Lam Dong, Dr. Phan Minh Sang and Mr. Nguyen Xuan Giap. To the last, we are grateful to Ms. Chaw Chaw Sein at the Chair of Tropical Silviculture and Forest Ecology at the University of Göttingen for her help in field work and data management.
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Appendix
Appendix
For the estimation of single tree volumes the models given in Table 5 have been used, where V i gives the single tree volume in m3 of a tree i and the other variables are as defined earlier. The term X was used in the given publication to transform from underbark to overbark volume.
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Schnell, S., Kleinn, C. & Álvarez González, J.G. Stand Density Management Diagrams for Three Exotic Tree Species in Smallholder Plantations in Vietnam. Small-scale Forestry 11, 509–528 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-012-9197-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-012-9197-z