Many of the traditional limitations to medium-term silvicultural planning, especially the technical and methodical constraints to predicting future thinnings, product yields and tree growth, are becoming less significant. Forest managers have become more amenable to unconventional objectives and greater personal freedom in making individual silvicultural choices is no longer seen as a threat. One of the tasks of forest planning is to capture person-dependent modifications of forest structure through thinnings, using a new concept of forest inventory.