Glossary
The National Indigenous Forestry Strategy (NIFS) glossary explains commonly used terms, such as plantation capability and suitability.
Economic Analysis
Economic analysis compares costs and returns from a plantation with the existing agricultural enterprise. While changes in land use are sometimes associated with non-economic values, the predominant driver for land use change is economics.
Indigenous Coordination Centre
Indigenous Coordination Centres or ICCs operate in 31 locations around Australia. They look after most of the Australian Government's Indigenous programs and negotiate Shared Responsibility Agreements with local Indigenous people and communities.
Land Availability
Refers to the area of suitable land ultimately available for a particular use such as plantation. For plantation development, land availability can be defined as the willingness of landowners to make their land available at prices and/or conditions that could attract an alternative use.
Land Capability
Assesses the land in terms of biophysical factors. It aims to define the intrinsic, or potential capacity of land to support sustained, defined uses, such as tree cropping with specified species and management inputs.
Land Suitability
Suitability is the stage at which practical limitations on plantation establishment are considered. While capability determines the inherent ability of a site to grow a given species, suitability reports on external factors that stop plantation establishment. For example, the majority of highly capable sites occur on incompatible land uses such as National Park, or in areas of existing native forest. Suitability does not address economic factors.
Mean Annual Increment
The average volume of timber produced per year for a forest stand of known age. This is a measure of productivity. e.g. High productivity plantations may produce over 20 cubic metres of wood per hectare each year.
Plantation
An area of land on which the predominant number of trees forming, or expected to form, the canopy are trees that have been planted (whether by sowing seed or otherwise) for the purpose of timber production.
Plantation Silviculture
The development and care of forests. Usually refers to the establishment and management of plantations.
Rainfall reliability
Rainfall reliability provides a broad index of the relative risk of plantation failure due to low rainfall reliability.