Determining the criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management (Case study: Nav-e Asalem, Guilan province)

Whereas sustainability is a principle in forest management, a mechanism to identify and quantify the sustainability is of great importance, too. Although several indicators and criteria exist at the international level, the main challenge is to define criteria and indicators and implement them at the national, regional and local levels of implement sustainable forest management. The purpose of this paper is to define appropriate criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management through a network of multi-criteria decision analysis methods in the Nav-e Asalem forests in Guilan province. The result included a set of 11 criteria and 65 indicators (5 ecological, 2 social and 4 economic criteria). In addition, the results showed that the area of natural forests with healthy regeneration, tree marking of seed stock and balance between growth and harvesting are the most important indicators for sustainable forest management in local scale across the study site. Of least importance were import and localization of appropriate technologies and capacity to implement international instruments.