Quantitative measurement of spatial forest patterns in Flanders.

Worldwide, scientists and policy-makers emphasize the importance of planning and managing forests for multiple goals. Forests are considered as one of the elements of a landscape. When forests are to be managed at a landscape scale, there is a need for methodologies that describe these forested landscapes quantitatively. In the field of landscape ecology, a comprehensive list of descriptive variables is available for this aim. The selection of relevant variables is therefore important. This paper analyses the forest cover pattern of Flanders. Using multivariate techniques, a set of variables is selected.