Valuation of Airborne Laser Scanning Based Forest Information

Abstract

When an inventory is planned for, the decision makers typically strive for maximizing accuracy of the information with a given budget, or even maximize accuracy without considering any budget at all. Recent developments in airborne laser scanning and other remote sensing techniques facilitate the use of data obtained from such sources as an integrated part of the forest inventory process. However, a rational decision maker would not pay for information that is more expensive than the expected improvement in the value of the decisions based on the new informa- tion. The statistical accuracy that usually is provided in the remote sensing literature does not dictate the usefulness of the data in decision making. In this chapter we present methods to assess the value of information and go through the recent research related to this where we in different ways try to establish the links between the inventory effort level, decisions to be made and the value of information.