Help Index

Species Selection Module

The Forestry Compendium includes a powerful but simple 'Species Selection Module', which helps the user identify species (including unfamiliar species) which might be suitable for a planting programme.

The species selection takes into account a wide variety of factors including:

• Latitude, altitude, temperature, rainfall, soil
• Land use (e.g. agroforestry, soil improvement, revegetation, erosion control, shelter)
• Silviculture (e.g. N-fixation; resistance to wind, drought, waterlogging, fire, salt)
• Wood uses (e.g. fuelwood, roundwood, sawn wood, including detailed uses)
• Non-wood uses (e.g. fodder, mulches, food, medicinal products, resins, honey)

To access the module, click on Species Selection Module on the menu (beige) at the top of the page, or select Species Selection Module from the Main Menu or the Species Selection Module item on the Search page.

Read the introduction to the module and click to continue. To see more information on how the module works, follow the link provided to Choice of Species.

Select criteria to match your requirements from the list. Each major category contains a number of sub-categories (italicised below), each containing a number of criteria:

• Distribution
      Country or Region
      Latitude
• Environment
      Altitude
      Rainfall
      Temperature
      Soil Properties
• Silviculture
      Silvicultural Data
• Uses
      Land/Environment
      Wood
      Non-Wood

Select a sub-category. Select criteria to search on one of the sub-category pages. Some criteria are simple tick boxes (e.g. Uses), others are single values, whilst some criteria permit the entry of ranges of values (e.g. Altitude and Temperature). Search a sub-category by clicking on the Search button on the bottom right of the screen.

You may then select criteria from one or more other sub-categories, and select Search again, or else proceed in your search: the criteria for the search are displayed at the base of the screen.

To see what species fit these criteria, first select view results and *prioritize the criteria.

Then Select Search again.

The module returns a colour-coded prioritized list of matches and partial matches to the chosen criteria. The columns of the list to the right of the screen detail the matching status of each of the criteria. + indicates a match or that a value is within an acceptable range; +/- is a partial match; ? an uncertain match; and - is a non-match. Equally suitable species are displayed in alphabetical order, and disadvantages such as invasiveness are flagged with a warning symbol . From the list of results you could look at the disadvantage (click on the symbol), go to a tree datasheet, or return to the previous pages to modify or re-prioritize your selection.

Note: an uncertain match occurs when no data are available for the selection criteria. For example, if an upper limit to mean annual rainfall is not available for a species, any search that includes this element in the criteria will result in an uncertain match for that species (unless the selected value is below the lower limit).

*Why prioritize the criteria?

The results are ordered according to how they match the ordered criteria. For example, if frost tolerance is one of the criteria, you may not be interested in species that do not tolerate frost even if they match the other criteria. Ordering the criteria with the 'most important' at the top will help you interpret the results.

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