About The Commonwealth Forestry Archive
Bangor University in the UK holds internationally important archives on forest management.
In the early 20th century, formal forestry was established in most tropical countries in which the UK had an interest.
Inventory was generally undertaken by the early Forestry Departments in these countries, for the purpose of determining the stocking of the forest, analyzing tree growth rates from dynamic permanent sample plots, and the determination of timber value.
Through the 1960s the Oxford Forestry Institute provided a forestry data analysis service and accumulated copies of data and related correspondence. Returning forestry officers often retained personal copies while records of ecological research were also kept or copied to UK universities. Considerable holdings of data and grey reports from colonial times to the present have therefore accumulated in the UK. For many countries, these holdings represent the only extant copies of this information.
Primary Source Materials
The material spans the period from 1961 to 1990 and includes information on the following countries: Argentina; Australia; Bahamas; Bangladesh; Belize; Cameroon; Chile; Colombia; Costa Rica; Cyprus; East Africa; Ethiopia; Fiji; Ghana; Guyana; Haiti; Honduras; Indonesia; Kenya; Liberia; Malawi; Malaysia; Nigeria; Papua New Guinea; Samoa; Sierra Leone; Solomon Islands; South Africa; Sri Lanka; St Lucia; Swaziland; Tanzania; Trinidad; Uganda; Zambia.
These data are invaluable as a resource for research. They can often serve as a pre-industrialisation baseline for forest monitoring and global carbon and climate change modelling. Practically it can also provide context and inform current forest management.
