Molina Valero, Juan AlbertoDiéguez Aranda, UlisesÁlvarez González, Juan GabrielCastedo Dorado, FernandoPérez Cruzado, César2020-10-262020-10-262019Molina-Valero, J.A., Diéguez-Aranda, U., Álvarez-González, J.G. et al. Assessing site form as an indicator of site quality in even-aged Pinus radiata D. Don stands in north-western Spain. Annals of Forest Science 76, 113 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13595-019-0904-11286-4560http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23416Key message: Site form and site index have shown similar precision for estimating site quality in even-aged Pinus radiata D. Don stands in north-western Spain. Additionally, SF presents the advantage that it does not require stand age information and can therefore be used in a wider set of situations in the forestry practice. Context: Estimation of site quality is essential for characterizing, monitoring and predicting forest resources. Site index (i.e. the dominant height of the stand at a reference age) is ordinarily used to estimate site quality; however, this index is only useful for even-aged stands of known age. By contrast, SF is age-independent as it uses the dominant height of the stand at a reference dominant diameter. Aims: The aim of this study was to compare the performance of SF and SI for site quality estimation in even-aged P. radiata stands. Methods: Dynamic equations derived with the Generalized Algebraic Difference Approach (GADA) from the Hossfeld IV base model were fitted to predict site quality with both SI and SF. SF predictions were compared with SI regarding variability within the same plot and consistency in site quality predictions, using the observed maximum mean annual volume increment (MAI) as a direct measure of site quality. Results: Both approaches showed good performance in model fitting and provided similar goodness-of-fit statistics and variability in the predictions. However, SI performed slightly stronger when related to MAI. Conclusion: SF performed adequately in estimating site quality for even-aged P. radiata stands, with results comparable to those obtained using traditional SIeng© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were madeAtribución 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Site indexPredictingDominant diameterDominant heightStand agejournal article10.1007/s13595-019-0904-11297-966Xopen access