Merging National Forest and National Forest Health Inventories to Obtain an Integrated Forest Resource Inventory – Experiences from Bavaria, Slovenia and Sweden

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%