In 2002 (International Year of Mountains declared by the United Nations) twelve years have elapsed since Resolution S4 "Adaptating the Managennent of Mountain Forests to New Environmental Conditions" was signed at Strasbourg at the 1st Ministerial Conference on Forests in Europe (1990). Over this period, a lot of crucial research findings about the dynamics of structural and functional changes in different air-pollution environmental conditions of mountain forests have been acquired. These findings have been applied to formulate the management of mountain forest ecosystems on an exact basis. The formulation and application of sustainable management of mountain forests have highlighted an ecosystem approach to forests, rebuilding of forests damaged by air-pollution environmental stresses, use of autochthonous species and conservation of their gene resources, formation of near-natural species, age and spatial composition, group to individual management system and maximum use of spontaneous processes, particularly natural regeneration. The approach to forests in the framework of forest management has developed rapidly not only in this country but also in adjacent countries with advanced European forest management. An important act was the establishment of European Observatory of Mountain Forests (EOMF), based at Saint Jean d'Arvey in France, in June 1998 as an international coordinating unit of Resolution S4. International cooperation in the field of the exchange of knowledge and experience applicable to mountain forest management has substantially improved since then. Particularly scientific conferences, working seminars and practical instructional courses, attended by participants from Europe and the remaining world, were held aimed at a broad spectrum of problems of monitoring, research and management of mountain forests. The "White Book about Mountain Forests in Europe" published with the Czech Republic's participation in 2000 (Buttoud et al. 2000) was an important EOMF contribution. As the social requirements for forests to fulfill not only production but also ecological or environmental functions were increasingly accentuated, methods of multifunctional mountain forest management were gradually elaborated. Simultaneously, forest owners and the public increasingly claimed rationalization of management methods and economic autonomy of forest property Accordingly, to ensure sustainable as well as economically efficient management of mountain forests appropriate methods of management of forest stands are sought, with maximum use of creative forces of the nature. The rational trend of sustainable management of mountain forests set in the CR in the nineties brought about a new quality of the approach to forest that is markedly different from a large-area clear-cutting system used mainly in the seventies and eighties, when the biological nature of the forest was neglected. The tradition of shelterwood forest management practiced by enlightened forest managers before World War II and still in the fifties and sixties was resumed. Current trends of sustainable forest management are based on maximum utilization of the existing knowledge of forest typology and forest ecosystem ecology. Such an approach in today's forest political environment of the CR and dose joining in the present Pan-European forest environment allow to make great progress toward the acceptable ecosystem-based forest management, particularly by uniting scientific knowledge and extensive silvicultural experience within this country and adjacent European countries as well. If the set tendency of sustainable forest management persists and such management methods continue to be developed, the prosperous future of cur mountain forests, heavily afflicted by an air pollution environmental disaster in the past (in the 60ies to the 90ies) will be ensured globally.
