Adapting National Forest Inventories to changing requirements - the case of the Swedish National Forest Inventory at the turn of the 20th century

By Jonas Fridman, Sören Holm, Mats B. Nilsson, P. H. Nilsson, Anna H. Ringvall, Göran Ståhl. 2014

270 citations recorded by the source corpus.

National Forest Inventories (NFIs) are becoming increasingly important worldwide in order to provide information about the multiple functions of forests, e.g. their provision of raw materials to industry, biodiversity and their capacity to store carbon for mitigating climate change. In several countriesthehistoryofNFIsisverylong. �Forthesecountriesaspecificchallengeistokeepthe � inventoriesup-to-datewithoutsacrificingtheadvantagesassociatedwithlongtimeseries. �Atthe � turn of the 20th century European NFIs faced some major challenges. In this article we describe the history and the recent developments of the Swedish NFI as an example from which general observations are made and discussed. The Swedish NFI started in 1923 and has evolved from an inventory with a narrow focus on wood resources to an inventory today which aims to provide information about all major forest ecosystem services. It can be concluded that the traditional approachesofmostEuropeanNFIs, �e.g. �tocollectdatathroughsampleplotfieldinventories, �has � provedtobeapplicableevenforawiderangeofnewinforma tionrequirements. �Specifically , � detailed data about land use, trees, vegetation, and soils has found new important uses in con- nection with biodiversity assessments and the estimation of greenhouse gas emissions. Though time-consuminganddifficult, �makingNFIinformationcompa rableacrosscountriesthrough � harmonizationappearstobeausefulapproach. �TheEuropeanNationalForestInventoryNetwork� (ENFIN) was formed in 2003 and has been successful in pan-European NFI harmonization.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Insect Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d43a35c2cf5bf458b423c50faf6175d91e446acb