Socio-ecological forest systems are highly complex.

Certification is a process of controlling particular aspects of a system to provide some guarantee that the system complies with an agreed set of rules.

Certification is a process of controlling particular aspects of a system to provide some guarantee that the system complies with an agreed set of rules. In other words, certification initiatives aim to set and implement standards and communicate these to the external world (Marx and Cupyers 2010). The principles and criteria of certification have been likened to a filter (Meidinger et al. 2003): You take a management system, pour...

Monitoring needs to assess implementation of standards and then verify whether results achieve overall sustainability objectives.

Monitoring needs to consider quality and quantity of forest goods and services.

Selection of indicators for monitoring should consider effectiveness, scientific relevance and costs.

Opportunity costs of avoided deforestation need to be monitored.

Monitoring and verification are key aspects of certification that should ensure that certified forests keep fulfilling the agreed principles and criteria (Nussbaum 2005). Monitoring provides evidence to buyers that certified goods and services are indeed obtained from forests managed according to agreed standards. Also, monitoring assists forest managers in the adaptive...

There are several possible indicators to monitor the provision of ecosystem services each with different advantages and disadvantages.

Certification of carbon sequestration has the most potential to succeed.

Communities can be involved in monitoring through participatory monitoring methods.

It will be important that certification leads to forest management that maintains or enhances the provision of services. As mentioned earlier this may not require quantification of the service produced but for trading purposes the provision of service may need to be measured. Hence, in this section we discuss the measurement of services and provide potential indicators that are either directly or...

Current FSC standards provide a good basis for developing compliance monitoring indicators for forest management for provision of ecosystem services.

However, additional indicators that are relatively cheap and simple to measure are needed.

One of the goals of the ForCES project is to develop scientifically derived verifiable compliance monitoring indicators for forest management for ecosystem services. These indicators should have global relevance, be relatively cheap and simple to measure and preferably fit existing FSC criteria. New indicators could borrow from existing ones in these standards because some standards in existing FSC forest management certification could feed right into the ecosystem...