Treesearch

Corporate inventory systems have historically had a greater spatial and temporal intensity than is common in the public sector. For many corporations, these inventory systems might be described as dynamic in that current estimates rely on a small amount of recent data and a large amount of information resulting from the imputation of older data that have been subjected to various growth and mortality models. Usually the "best available" models are used for this purpose, with little attention paid to any population dynamics that may have occurred since development of the models. This paper...

Variability of external and internal factors entails specific spatial patterns and functional dynamics of communities. The study of the oak-lime-hornbeam (Quercus robur-Tilia cordata-Carpimus) forest in the Bialowieza Primeval Forest supports the concept of silvatic unit, determining the minimal structural area. To find out if the dynamics of a stand can be inferred from its spatial pattern, and to compare the structural properties of natural and managed hardwoods, detailed mapping of developmental phases in natural and managed stands was performed. While the mosaic composition in Bialowiez...

Designing a large multiresource inventory is horribly difficult, it is not work for faint hearts, and the 250,000,000-acre size of British Columbia is not a trivial problem. Completion of the details (as opposed to stopping the work) is a process prone to collapse. After that point, implementation is also likely to fail.

This paper addresses opportunities presented to states by an annualized forest inventory system, to be conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis program of the USDA Forest Service, and concerns about these inventories. The importance of a balanced approach in assessing timber and nontimber attributes is emphasized, and the paramount importance of maintaining and even increasing the credibility and utility of inventories is discussed. Annualized inventories appear to be a very good idea for Nebraska if implemented properly. A key issue facing forestry and agriculture in Nebraska is...

In 1997, 25 Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) plots were established in two Indiana state parks and a nearby parcel of privately owned land using a new protocol that differs from the systematic grid of the national program. All plots were reassessed in 1998. Data analysis focuses upon establishing baseline conditions for the study sites and providing relevant information for park management.

International and regional efforts to define a suitable list of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management show the new role of forestry within the environmental sector and the need for an effective integration of forest inventories in natural resources surveys. This paper examines the potential of forest inventories to support such needs, with specific reference to the Italian situation as a case study, in the enlarged framework of the European Union. In this country, where forest policy is mainly administrated at the local level, forest inventories have been on the...

A plot selection approach is proposed based on experience from the Annual Forest Inventory System (AFIS) in the Aspen-Birch Unit of northeastern Minnesota. The emphasis is on a mixture of strategies. Although the Agricultural Act of 1998 requires that a fixed 20 percent of plots be measured each year in each state, sooner or later we will need to vary the scheme to accommodate pressing user needs and budget constraints while still preserving the integrity of the annualized cycle. Differing probabilities of selection will need to be accommodated; variance and confidence interval estimation...

Several challenges faced the Province of British Columbia in the early 1990's as we undertook a major redesign of our inventory systems: a provincial legislated demand requiring the chief forester to develop and maintain an inventory of the land and forests in British Columbia; existing inventories of the 94.5 million ha of the province; the need to meet new information requirements to address criteria of sustainable forest management and their associated indicators; the need to link previously almost disparate systems in growth and yield and inventory through common sampling and monitoring...

This paper presents an overview of the Forest Health Monitoring Program (FHM), a partnership among the USDA Forest Service, State Foresters, universities, and the USDI Bureau of Land Management. The purpose of FHM is to annually assess the condition of the nation's forested ecosystems in a standardized way. There are four components of the program - Detection Monitoring, Evaluation Monitoring, Intensive Site Ecosystem Monitoring, and Research on Monitoring Techniques. At the current level of FHM development, approximately 60 percent of all forestlands in the lower 48 states, regardless of...

Guided transect sampling is a two-stage sampling design in which prior information is used to guide the field survey in the second stage. In the first stage, broad strips are randomly selected and divided into grid-cells. For each cell a covariate value is estimated from remote sensing data, for example. The covariate is the basis for subsampling of a transect through the broad strip. The general idea of guided transect sampling can be combined with different transect-based field inventory methods. This paper describes guided transect sampling and provides some results from a theoretical...