Forest inventories throughout the world have evolved gradually over time. The content as well as the concepts and de?nitions employed are constantly adapted to the users’ needs. Advanced inventory systems have been established in many countries within Europe, as well as outside Europe, as a result of development work spanning several decades, in some cases more than 100 years. With continuously increasing international agreements and commitments, the need for information has also grown drastically, and reporting requests have become more frequent and the content of the reports wider. Some of the agreements made at the international level have direct impacts on national economies and international decisions, e. g. , the Kyoto Protocol. Thus it is of utmost importance that the forest information supplied is collected and analysed using sound scienti?c principles and that the information from different countries is comparable. European National Forest Inventory (NFI) teams gathered in Vienna in 2003 to discuss the new challenges and the measures needed to get data users to take full advantage of existing NFIs. As a result, the European National Forest Inventory Network (ENFIN), a network of NFIs, was established. The ENFIN members decided to apply for funding for meetings and collaborative activities. COST– European Cooperation in Science and Technology - provided the necessary ?n- cial means for the realization of the program.

This book has been developed as a forest inventory textbook for students and could also serve as a handbook for practical foresters. We have set out to keep the mathematics in the book at a fairly non-technical level, and therefore, although we deal with many issues that include highly sophisticated methodology, we try to present first and foremost the ideas behind them. For foresters who need more details, references are given to more advanced scientific papers and books in the fields of statistics and biometrics. Forest inventory books deal mostly with sampling and measurement issues, as found here in section I, but since forest inventories in many countries involve much more than this, we have also included material on forestry applications. Most applications nowadays involve remote sensing technology of some sort, so that section II deals mostly with the use of remote sensing material for this purpose. Section III deals with national inventories carried out in different parts of world, and section IV is an attempt to outline some future possibilities of forest inventory methodologies. The editors, Annika Kangas Professor of Forest Mensuration and Management, Department of Forest Resource Management, University of Helsinki. Matti Maltamo Professor of Forest Mensuration, Faculty of Forestry, University of Joensuu. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sound forest management planning requires cost-efficient approaches to optimally utilize given resources. Emphasizing the mathematical and statistical features of forest sampling to assess classical dendrometrical quantities, Sampling Techniques for Forest Inventories presents the statistical concepts and tools needed to conduct a modern for

Timber measurement techniques applicable to any tree inventory project regardless of management objectives are covered by this text. Thorough coverage of sampling designs, land measurements, tree measurements, forest inventory field methods, and growth projections ensures utility for all foresters. Included are chapters on aerial photographs, GIS, and using similar techniques to measure other natural resources such as rangelands, wildlife, and water.

Designed to aid readers in gathering the most reliable quantitative information on forests for the least cost. Thoroughly explains the interrelationships between sampling strategies; discusses forestry techniques of efficient tactics; examines new developments in statistics having immediate applications in forestry and describes related developments that should have relevance in the future. Includes practical methods for dealing with forest data such as tree number, height, diameter and marketable wood. Also contains problem sets.

Building on more than a decade of innovative research into multi-source forest inventory (MS-NFI) this book presents full details of the development, outputs and applications of the improved k-NN method. The method, which was pioneered in Finland in 1990, is rapidly becoming a world standard in forest inventory, having been adopted as standard in Finland and Sweden, and recently introduced in Austria and across the US. The book describes in detail the full MS-NFI process, and the input data used – including field data, satellite images, and digital map data, as well as coarse-scale variation of forest variables. It also presents comprehensive information on the types of outputs which can be derived, including maps and statistics, describing, for example, stock volumes and development, dominant tree species, age-class distribution, and large and small-scale variation. The book will provide an invaluable resource for those involved in forest inventory, including government departments and bodies involved in forest policy, management and monitoring, forest managers, and researchers and graduate students interested in forest inventory, modelling and analysis. It will find an additional market among those interested in Earth observation, ecology and broader areas of environmental and natural resource management. Erkki Tomppo was the winner of the 1997 Marcus Wallenberg Prize for his work on the k-NN method.