Forest modelling: Conserving the past and building the future

Forest models are a valuable summary of the forest data from which they are derived. Such models encapsulate the information and knowledge within the source data and as such are a primary means of understanding forest structure and processes. At a time when there is much discussion and activity concerned with building distributed data warehouses of forest data, it is incumbent on forest modellers to consider the conservation of forest models that have been developed to-date. Accordingly, the establishment of a forest model archive (FMA) has been proposed by Rennolls et al. at an IUFRO 4.11 meeting in Greenwich, June 2001, and such an initiative has been adopted by IUFRO 4.11, and subsequently also by IUFRO 4.01, at the IUFRO 4.01 Vancouver conference, 2001. The first part of this chapter reports on the progress in this initiative since then. In particular, some of the features of a 'small' prototype FMA (www. forestmodelarchive. info) are described and discussed. Having considered the need for, and implementation of, a forest model archive to conserve and enhance the sharing of forest models of the past, it is natural to consider the environment for the development, publication and sharing of future forest models. This has led to the formation of a new peer-reviewed e-journal, Forest Biometry, Modelling, and Information Sciences, (FBMIS), which was launched in the summer of 2002 (www.FBMIS.info). The aims of FBMIS are presented and discussed.