The Ecological Forest Inventory of Catalonia: A tool for functional ecology

This paper describes the particular characteristics of IEFC that makes it singular unique tool for the advance of forest ecological understanding. The IEFC stressed by sampling uncommon variables such as biomass and production of branches and leaves, growth curves or nutrient content in wood, bark, branches and leaves. This additional information allowed to carry out some functional studies. In this paper we briefly review the most relevant results regarding: i) the geographical distribution of functional traits across levels of organization and intraspecific and interspecific variability along environmental gradients; ii) the positive relationship between species richness and timber production in Mediterranean forests; iii) the trend to higher growth during most of the twentieth century reversed from year 1970 by lower water availability and; iv) stoichiometric relationships of nutrients by species and functional groups along environmental gradients. Today it is clear that the inclusion of these functional variables in a forest inventory is essential to better understand forest responses to environmental changes and evaluate the suitability of different management strategies