The Soiling, a mountainous forested area in northwestern Germany, has been the location of interdisciplinary forest ecosystem research from the early 1960s on. The methodology developed and employed there was novel and pioneering at that time. It enabled the quantitative description of matter and energy budgets for entire ecosystems and the connection of such process rates to ecosystem structures such as species composition, age, and biotic communities. The flux monitoring methodology developed at Soiling and other early case studies is nowadays routinely applied at forest monitoring sites worldwide, e.g., in the European Level-II network of ICP Forests (International Co-operative Programme on Assessment and Monitoring of Air Pollution Effects on Forests). Soiling holds the longest complete and continuous biogeochemical flux records in forest ecosystems worldwide.
Recently the scope of forest ecosystem research at Soiling has been expanded from the plot scale to the entire forest landscape. The main motivation for this scaling up was the desire to transfer the wealth of forest ecological knowledge obtained from prior research into practical forest management. GIS-based models provide spatially explicit estimates of important indicators such as diversity of forest stand types and risk of wind throw at the forest management unit level, and are a good basis to support practical forest management decisions.