We quietly lost our dear director, colleague, friend and teacher Ismet Sendić — recognised in forestry circles as an outstanding expert in forest management planning, and gentle and considerate in his dealings with people. He devoted much of his life to building Wald-Projekt d.o.o. Bosanska Krupa and to young people, to whom he passed on the practical knowledge of his rich experience.
Born in 1952 in Špionica near Srebrenik, he completed primary school and grammar school in Orašje. He graduated from the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Sarajevo in 1975, and later enrolled in postgraduate study in forest management planning on typological foundations.
He began his career in 1975 at the Forestry Design Bureau in Banja Luka. After a period working in Germany, he returned to work at the “Risovac” forestry enterprise in Bihać, and then in the forest-management department of “Unsko-sanske šume”, where he initiated the first post-war forest management plans in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In 2004, as a pioneer of private enterprise in forestry, he founded his own company, Wald-Projekt d.o.o. Bosanska Krupa, which he led until retiring in 2018. Over a career spanning more than 40 years he mastered nearly every engineering and planning aspect of forestry — from management planning and inventories to the design of forest roads and bridges.
He was a prominent advocate of modernising and digitising forestry, and is rightly credited with popularising GIS in the profession. Through his company he led the development of software for processing inventory data and producing forest management plans for state and private forests — a lasting legacy.
Dear teacher, may the Bosnian soil rest lightly upon you — thank you for the patience, effort and knowledge you passed on to us, for the chances you gave us, and for all the support without which we could hardly keep walking through these hilly Bosnian-Herzegovinian forests.
Text adapted from “Naše šume” no. 62–63, In memoriam.