Meeting on "Regenerating Mountain Forests Prerequisite for Sustainable Management";
Venue: Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, Germany
Date: 12-16 September 2004

International Conference: "The Question of Conversion of Coniferous Forest";
Venue: Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
Date: 27 September-02 October 2003
Website: http://www.forst.uni-freiburg.de/Waldwachstum/events.htm
Contact Person: Prof. Dr. Heinrich Spiecker, instww(at)uni-freiburg.de, Ms. Marianne Stadler, marianne.stadler(at)iww.uni-freiburg.de

The meeting "‘Uneven-aged Forest management: Alternative Forms, Practices, and Constraints" (Espoo and Southern Finland, post-congress tour in Northern Finland and Sweden, June 8 – 17, 2003) was the fourth in a series of meetings arranged in this theme on uneven-aged forestry in the last six years. Earlier conferences on uneven-aged management have been arranged outside boreal forests and now the focus was on uneven-aged forestry alternatives in the boreal forests.

The third meeting with the title "Uneven-aged Silviculture: Tradition and Practices in Central Europe" was held in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2001 and focussed on research methodology of irregular forest management, and discussed design, performance and evaluation of experiments. The papers were published in a special issue of Forestry in 2002.

The second meeting was hold in 1999 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it focussed on transformation of plantation forests. A message from that meeting was that a successful transformation from regular stand to irregular structures is a slow process, up to a century even in good growing conditions. Proceedings are available in a special issue of Forest Ecology and Management volume 151 from 2001.

The Unit’s first conference was held in 1997 in Corvallis, Oregon, USA, and hosted by Professor Bill Emmingham. This workshop and field tours provided great Oregonian opportunities for participants to share information about ways that could promote structure and diversity of forests and, at the same time, maintain wood flow. The workshop also featured then existing operational applications.