The term “mixed forest” is not uniformly defined either in general usage or in forestry language.
The National Forest Inventory defines mixed forest as a forest in which trees of at least two botanical genera occur, whereby each of them has at least a 10% area percentage. Therefore, a beech forest with oaks or a spruce forest with firs is also a mixed forest.
Mixtures of botanical species of the same genus, such as European oak and sessile oak are, by contrast, not mixed forests.
When differentiating between deciduous forests and coniferous forests, a deciduous forest is considered mixed if it has a 10% conifer admixture and vice versa.
