Nordic Database for Long-Term Forest Experiments (NOLTFOX)

The Nordic Forest Research Co-operation Committee (SNS) has for some years noticed that long-term field experiments in forests faced many of the same challenges in all Nordic countries. This was mainly problems in raising sufficient financial support for maintaining high quality experiments and thereby to assure collection of data and achieve valuable scientific results also in future. It was supposed that possible benefits for the maintenance of existing and the establishment of new high quality experiments, could be achieved by a closer Nordic co-operation within this field. One important prerequisite and the first step for increased scientific co-operation is to have a common database showing all experiments in the Nordic countries with a common classification standard. The Nordic Database for Long-Term Forest Experiments (NOLTFOX, Version 2001) is the result of the first attempt to make such a database, easily accessible for all.

The board of SNS initiated this work in June 1999. The main institutions dealing with long-term forest experiments in the Nordic countries were asked to participate in the work. In January 2000 the NOLTFOX project started according to a proposal from a working group. The objectives were at first hand:

1.Harmonizing data from existing (and new) national databases in the form of common descriptive variables for the experiments;
2.Conversion of all national databases to a common data format to create one common Nordic database; and
3.Creating a Nordic web site where the basic information about all the field experiments would be available through a flexible search module; e.g. country, municipality, objectives, keywords, geographical location, etc. [Note: The searchable subject fields for the field experiments are listed in this metadata report in the Keyword list (above) in UPPERCASE along with associated objectives/keywords in Sentence case.]

The project group consisted of researchers from all Nordic countries. The database was constructed by Jukka Pöntinen (Metla, Finland) and the visual layout was designed by Jouni Hyvärinen (Metla, Finland).

Future versions of NOLTFOX and expansion of the co-operation will later be decided after an evaluation. SNS hopes that the database will increase Nordic (and international) co-operation within forest research, increase the scientific quality of field research, and avoid expensive duplication of new experiments in the countries. Increased use of existing data and results will hopefully also be a result of NOLTFOX.