Understanding the Standard Forest Description¶
The Standard Forest Description (SFD) is a stand-alone Microsoft Excel workbook. The workbook contains a series of worksheets that hold the forest estate model and forest asset valuation data. The workbook has been designed to hold all such information in one place and be easily understood and audited, or passed via email amongst equity owners, consultants and stakeholders.
The format is predefined for each worksheet. The format must be followed for the forest description to be successfully converted into a normalised database for optimisation, solution extraction and reporting.
Tip
The standard forest description workbook can be most easily understood by considering it as a biological balance sheet. It is a forest owner's best understanding of their existing forest assets at a particular point in time, being the date of the forest description.
The forest description workbook has been organised so that the worksheets flow from empirical data such as age and area on the left, through growth, yield, operational management, regulation, usage and finally market allocation and revenue on the right. This logical layout has been designed so that the most static data are located on the left and the data most subject to change can be found on the right of the workbook. Users create a standard forest description by working through the worksheets from left to right.
An example of the standard forest description in Microsoft Excel format can be downloaded below. Note that all possible worksheets are shown in this example, whereas smaller models do not need all worksheets to be present.