According to the Habitats Directive member states must report to the European Commission on the status of the species and habitat types in the Natura 2000 network every six years. Integrated monitoring within the context of a forest monitoring is provided for forest habitat types. The purpose of this research is to draw up a comprehensive analysis of the structural diversity of forest habitat types in a large contiguous area with the data being collected within forest inventories, to highlight potential shortcomings and to suggest corrections or improvements. An area of seven forest habitat types was estimated in three different ways. Also, estimates for indicators of species and structural diversity were assessed and the change of main structural indicators within the six year reporting periods were identified. It was found out that a 10 years cyclic model of forest inventories provides a solid basis for assessing the structural diversity and identification of trends and that the density of the network of permanent sample plots enables a satisfactory precision of the estimates for the majority of habitat types. By the correction of method of describing forest stands in the manner to record a forest association on the forest stand level the evaluation of areas can be significantly improved, for a few critical small scale emerging forest habitat types without a significant impact on the scope of work. Also, with improvement in measurements on permanent sample plots, estimates for habitat trees could be provided.
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