Ståhl, Göran
- Department of Forest Resource Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Research article2014Peer reviewedOpen access
Kovač, Marko; Bauer, Arthur; Ståhl, Göran
Backgrounds, Material and Methods: To meet the demands of sustainable forest management and international commitments, European nations have designed a variety of forest-monitoring systems for specific needs. While the majority of countries are committed to independent, single-purpose inventorying, a minority of countries have merged their single-purpose forest inventory systems into integrated forest resource inventories. The statistical efficiencies of the Bavarian, Slovene and Swedish integrated forest resource inventory designs are investigated with the various statistical parameters of the variables of growing stock volume, shares of damaged trees, and deadwood volume. The parameters are derived by using the estimators for the given inventory designs. The required sample sizes are derived via the general formula for non-stratified independent samples and via statistical power analyses. The cost effectiveness of the designs is compared via two simple cost effectiveness ratios.Results: In terms of precision, the most illustrative parameters of the variables are relative standard errors; their values range between 1% and 3% if the variables' variations are low (s%<80%) and are higher in the case of higher variations. A comparison of the actual and required sample sizes shows that the actual sample sizes were deliberately set high to provide precise estimates for the majority of variables and strata. In turn, the successive inventories are statistically efficient, because they allow detecting the mean changes of variables with powers higher than 90%; the highest precision is attained for the changes of growing stock volume and the lowest for the changes of the shares of damaged trees. Two indicators of cost effectiveness also show that the time input spent for measuring one variable decreases with the complexity of inventories.Conclusion: There is an increasing need for credible information on forest resources to be used for decision making and national and international policy making. Such information can be cost-efficiently provided through integrated forest resource inventories.
PLoS ONE
2014, Volume: 9, number: 6
Publisher: PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
Forest
SLU Plant Protection Network
SDG15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Forest Science
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0100157
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/65085