Abstract
Assessing biodiversity in forests requires a reliable and sustainable monitoring concept, which must include all levels of diversity, the genetic, the species and the landscape level. Diversity studies should not be reduced to quantitative analysis, but qualitative interpretations are an important part for the understanding of the results. Also, the linkage of terrestrial data and remote sensing data as well the implementation of abiotic and biotic data collected on existing monitoring systems are useful sources to analyse cause-effect relationships and interactions between the different aspects of diversity.