ISO/TS 24972:2026

This document provides a guidance to manage cork oak forests in a sustainable way. This document is an informative document, which provides orientation for protecting cork oak forest while allowing appropriate use of the resources. It describes practices mainly focus on cork production while promoting cork oak forest regeneration, multiple benefits and mitigating global change. This technical report also points out practices which should be avoided or that are forbidden. The information given in this technical report could be also used for assessing future development of cork oak forests under different management scenarios as a guidance on how trade-offs between different forest functions should be dealt with. The target audience for this document is any stakeholder interested in forest management, such as: landowners and forest managers, but may also be useful for other stakeholders of the cork value chain. Since there could be readers without a basic knowledge of forestry, an effort has made for explaining the basic concepts related to forest management