Priority of management measures for natural forests based on the stand state

Forest management is the eternal theme in the development of forestry sciences. In order to reveal the mysteries of forest management and facilitate the scientific management of forest, we explored the selection priority of management measures of natural forests for the first time and tried to implement the “medical computed tomography” method for the forest and propose advices for natural forest management in this paper. Studies suggest that the priority of management measures is the arrangement of priority order of available measures and it can be realized by evaluating the stand state to diagnose management problems. The stand state can be described by the following eight indices:forest stand spatial structure, stand age structure, stand composition, stand density, stand growth, climax species or purpose species competition, stand regeneration and forest health, which reflects the structure, diversity and vitality of forest. We can diagnose forest management problems by applying stand state radar chart. We propose 120 ‘management prescriptions’ based on a combination of stand state, which cover most of issues in natural forest management. Our study finds that the structure-based forest management is most frequently applied among integration technologies in solving the problem of natural forest management. The possibility of using the target tree cultivation technology is very low when there are many problems in stand state. The promotion of natural regeneration and maintenance of soil fertility have almost the same application frequency as the traditional technical measures of thinning.