The monitoring in Swiss forest reserves has recently been relaunched based on a Swiss-wide
consistent concept. It is intended to provide federal authorities with the basis for Controlling in the field of the Swiss forest reserve policy and to enhance the scientific understanding of forest succession without human intervention. The monitoring encompasses forest structure, including dead wood, and tree characteristics that are important as habitat for organisms such as stem cavities with a mulm body, stem cracks and root plates. It should enable a characterization of natural forests in widespread phyto-sociological communities, e.g. those dominated by Picea abies or Fagus sylvatica. It combines surveys on 100 ha of permanent plots, which are 0.1 to 3.3 ha large, with an inventory on about 1400 sampling plots, similar to those used in the Swiss and other national forest inventories. In small reserves, a full callipering at the compartment level replaces the sampling inventory. Terrestrial repeat photography is used for documentation purposes. A monitoring of species richness of birds, fungi and insects was originally envisaged, but not implemented due to financial constraints. The monitoring takes place in 15 forest reserves with an intensive and in 29 reserves with an extensive observation program. 33 reserves that have been studied for 20 to 50 years play an important role in the reserve network, as they already enable an analysis of long-term trends in forest succession.