On the efficiency of beta-weibull distribution in modelling tree species’ volume compared to some univariate distributions

Sustainable Forest management requires knowledge of ecological requirements to ascertain the distribution of different species of trees. Climate change is a concern to all tree species, but some are more sensitive than others. Rightly skewed distributions were used to take care of these environmental tree species as obtained from FRIN with Beech Wood, White Afara, Opepe, Afon and Teak. The selected distributions were Gamma, Weibull, Log-normal and Beta-weibull, while other statistical tools were Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), Goodness of Fit, Probability Functions, Kolmogorov Smirnov-test to determine the best distribution for each selected specie as aimed in this research. The forecast of the five species over the months was estimated, It was established from the distributional pattern of the tree species' volume that the Beta-weibull distribution was a better fit for the White Afara, Opepe and Teak Species with the AIC values of 580.772, 630.84 and 733.60 respectively, the Gamma distribution was a better fit for the Beech wood with the AIC of 617.21 while the Weibull distribution was a better fit for the Afon specie with the AIC value of 752.07. In conclusion, the implication is that the Beta-weibull distribution described the tree species’ volume best among the four distributions used. Hence, it is recommended that Beta-weibull is the appropriate distribution to model forest specie due to its four parameters and goodness when fitting.