In an increasingly urbanised world more and more people are turning to our forests and woodland for recreation and tourism. Based on a study of forest recreation from across Europe, the editors bring together the expertise of more than 80 leading professionals and academics to provide a clear and concise guide to best practice.

Here is, for the first time, a Europe-wide overview of the state of recreation and nature tourism in forests. It describes the current situation and conflicts in the different regions of Europe and provides solutions illustrated by good practice examples.

*Please note the 2015 paperback is a reprint of the original 2008 hardback* In an increasingly urbanized world more and more people are turning to our forests and woodland for recreation and tourism. Planning and providing for this growing demand poses challenges that need to be addressed by managers and designers alike. Based on a study of forest recreation from across Europe, the editors bring together the expertise of more than eighty leading professionals and academics to provide a clear and concise guide to best practice. Case studies and careful research give a detailed insight into the issues that forest recreation raises, from strategic planning to integration into the existing rural economy. Essential reading for tourism planners, landscape designers and countryside managers delivering forest recreation and tourism.

Forest assessments aim at meeting a variety of information needs, such as forest health, forest volume and growth, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, as well as relationships between forests, climate change, and air pollution. Respective forest assessments have been implemented in Europe on different scales with different intensities. The ICP Forests has been established in 1985. With its currently more than 6800 large-scale and more than 760 intensive monitoring plots in Europe and with 40 countries of Europe as well as with Canada and the United States of America also participating, ICP Forests constitutes one of the largest forest monitoring programs in the world. It contributes cooperates with numerous scientific and political institutions and programs. In this context, an overview on current forest information needs and on monitoring approaches and initiatives is provided. Examples of main results are provided.

Abstract: Forest related social values such as recreation values are growing in importance in North European countries. Our urbanized societies need social services from forests and other nature areas. One of the key ecosystem services is the recreation environment provided by forests. Possibilities to enhance commercial recreational use of forests has been recognized, particularly among private forest owners, who have new opportunities for new types of forest-related entrepreneurship. This report provides a review of social indicators in forestry, particularly concerning nature-based recreation and tourism in North European countries. The common interest among scientists and other experts was to discuss how to develop social indicators and to monitor changes to social benefits in forestry and forest use. In all countries, there is a challenge to develop monitoring systems to produce inventory data for statistics that are required in a way that provid es comparable social indicators. It is timely to enhance standardization and harmonization of social indicators for monitoring and management of sustainable forestry and forest use, and for sustainable nature-based recreation and tourism

Strategic planning of forest resources in Europe requires reliable information on the status and trend of forest condition. National Forest Inventories (NFIs) and Forest Condition Monitoring (FCM) networks are primary sources of data for large area assessments of forest resources. This contribution seeks to outline a statistical perspective for the construction of a European forest monitoring system, able to provide statistically sound estimates of forest condition (defoliation) parameters and of their changes over time. Monitoring objectives, parameters of interest, and accuracy indexes are presented, under the assumption that a common definition for forests is adopted by European countries. The proposed estimators are of two types: (i) based solely on information acquired from FCM and (ii) derived from integration of FCM and NFIs.