Rebuilding spatial forest inventories from aggregated data

Abstract

The limited availability of data sets with a sufficiently high spatial scale and resolution can pose a significant challenge in the development and testing of new forest management and economics modeling approaches. This article describes and tests an algorithm for generating an ecologically and statistically consistent data set for the province of British Columbia by projecting publicly available aggregated forest inventory information back onto a landscape grid. The dispersal procedure assigns specific combinations of ecosystem, tree species, site quality, and age class parameters for each mapping tile, allowing for the use of standard growth and yield modeling procedures in simulating forest growth over time. Although ecosystem assignments were relatively accurate, significant location errors within forest management units remain for species, site quality, and age class assignments. © 2010 by the Society of American Foresters.