The Centres régionaux de la propriété forestière or CRPF (Regional forest owners' centres) are public institutions which have been created to guide and develop forest management in privately owned forests. The CRPF are responsible to the State for :

• Developing overall sylvicultural management plans for the 22 French Regions ;
• Approval procedures for the 33 000 simplified management plans for privately owned forests that cover a continuous area of more than 25 ha (3 400 000 ha in total) ;
• Drawing up codes of good sylvicultural practice and keeping a register of foresters abiding by these codes ;
• Approval procedures for standard management regulations.

In their capacity as development organisations, the CRPF encourage the creation of forest ownership groups (union associations for forestry work, which cover a total area of more than 110 000 ha) and forest grouping operations, and provide support to joint management bodies such as the OGEC.

The CRPF also provide sylvicultural training and information services to promote diverse sylvicultural methods. Each year, over 300 000 forestry producers are contacted and 30 000 receive individual or group training. All these forestry development activities draw on a network of technical and economic references.

A total of 312 technicians and 69 administrative staff receive guidance from 396 board members, including 21 Chamber of Agriculture presidents.

The CNPPF (National Professional Centre for Forest Owners) contributes to the development of French forests through advisory and coordination activities, research, training and knowledge dissemination.

Brief history
The CNPPF was formed on 1st January 2003 when the former National Association of Regional Forest Owners' Centres became a public institution. This association was in charge of missions that were common to all the CRPF and provided direct support to national missions.
These missions were naturally transferred to the CNPPF, which now interfaces between the CRPF, the public authorities and professional bodies for privately owned forests.

Objectives

• To clarify the system of professional forest bodies, bringing all forest development measures relating to privately owned forests under a single national body while maintaining decentralisation at regional level ;
• To improve consistency among forest development measures in the fields of applied research, training for forest owners and forest micro-economics ;
• To remove divisions between professional bodies by creating closer links between the national technical specialists within the IDF, extension agents in contact with the CRPF and forest owners ;
• To optimise the use of public funds, given that measures in the general interest are funded from the State budget.

Services of common interest
The CNPPF provides a number of "services of common interest" to all of the CRPF. These include information technology, ISO and environmental certification, experimentation, expertise on legal, legislative and regulatory aspects, sustainable management documents and support to staff management and to the management of national funding for CRPF activities.

The CNPPF has also taken over the coordination and financing of the FOGEFOR forest management training programme.

65 CETEF and forest development groups are working within different French départements. These sylvicultural associations set up technical and economic experiments, inviting neighbouring foresters to share sylvicultural expectations and experiments of their own.

The Groupements de Vulgarisation Forestière or GVF (forestry extension groups) and Groupements de Développement Forestier or GDF (forestry development groups) contribute to the dissemination of technical advances at département level.

The CETEF and forestry groups cooperate locally on the running of extension and development activities implemented by the CRPF, the forestry cooperatives and the Chambers of Agriculture. All are not-for-profit associations and work in liaison with the IDF.

The Institut pour le développement forestier or IDF (Institute for forest development) is the technical body for privately owned forests in France. It was founded in 1961 as a not-for-profit association. On 1st January 2006, it became part of the CNPPF as a forestry utility department.

The IDF has thirty-five technical and administrative supervisory staff who work partly at the Paris head office and partly within provincial agencies.

The IDF's missions

• Developing sylvicultural models that are geared to the technical, economic and human realities of private agricultural or forest ownership.
  
  To achieve this, the IDF organises and leads working groups on specialised topics (irregular treatments, regular treatments of the main social broadleaved trees such as sweet chestnut, poplars, lowland conifers, etc.). The IDF also acts as the umbrella organisation for the CETEF
  
  The IDF first of all has to identify needs and draw up specifications for solutions, then search the literature on forest research, study the documentation, develop adaptations and innovations and set up experiments in close collaboration with its many partners. For example, the Experimentation Centre for French private forests collects data from the most significant experiments carried out by the CRPF and IDF in order to process the results at national level.
  
• Disseminating results via the Forêt entreprise journal, technical and general guides and software applications and organising training courses and sessions, which may be tailored to specific needs or on offer from the IDF catalogue or web site at www.foretpriveefrancaise.com.