Assessing Forest Production Using Terrestrial Monitoring Data

Abstract

Accurate assessments of forest biomass are becoming an increasingly important aspect of natural resource management. Besides their use in sustainable resource usage decisions, a growing focus on the carbon sequestration potential of forests means that assessment issues are becoming important beyond the forest sector. Broad scale inventories provide much-needed information, but interpretation of growth from successive measurements is not trivial. Even using the same data, various interpretation methods are available. The mission of this paper is to compare the results of fixed-plot inventory designs and angle-count inventories with different interpretation methods. The inventory estimators that we compare are in common use in National Forest Inventories. No method should be described as “right” or “wrong”, but users of large-scale inventory data should be aware of the possible errors and biases that may be either compensated for or magnified by their choice of interpretation method. Wherever possible, several interpretation methods should be applied to the same dataset to assess the possibility of error.