The potential Natura 2000 areas, proposed to the European Commission, include more than one quarter million hectares of Slovenian forests. Similarly to the other EU member states, we are going to monitor the conservation status of forest habitat types in Slovenia as well, in order to investigate and argue, whether the habitat types and species, contributing to the proclamation of Natura 2000 areas, are still in a favorable conservation status. The paper discusses the suggested indicators relevant for monitoring stand structure anddiversity in two of the forest habitat types in Slovenia, the estimated variability of these indicators on research and permanent sampling plots, the estimated changes of these indicators in periods of time, comparable with 10-year periods in forest management planning. We tested the indicators for the assessment of stand structure and its changes in the area of spruce forests on Pokljuka and in dinaric fir-beech forests on the high Karst. In both areas it was possible to use the data from forestry research plots and from the continuous forest inventory in order to compare the indicators of thestand structure. The presented indicators of forest stands structure could be used for the assessment of condition and changes in Slovenian forest habitat types without significantly changing or supplementing the existing method of work on permanent sampling plots that became a basis for the collection of data on condition and development of forests.
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