Identification of boreal mixedwood forest structure cohorts in Northwestern Ontario using Ontario's forest resource inventory, Abitibi-Bowater's continuous forest inventory and stepwise discriminant function analysis

Abstract

A model was developed to determine if Ontario's Forest Resource Inventory (FRI) could be used to classify boreal mixedwood stands in northwestern Ontario into structural cohorts as proposed in the Multi Cohort Forest Management (MCFM) concept. Successful methods developed to-date for determining cohort status rely on Weibull functions of tree diameter distributions. This study proposed an alternative method for multi-cohort classification based on the range of stand attributes found in the FRI.