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Two approaches to greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories are common, namely the stock-change approach and the gain–loss approach. With the stock-change approach, mean annual emissions are estimated as the ratio of the difference in stock estimates at two points in time and the number of intervening years. The stock-change approach is fairly easy to implement for countries with well-established forest sampling programs. However, countries without established forest sampling programs more commonly use the gain–loss approach. With this approach, emissions are estimated as the product of the areas of classes of land use change, characterized as activity data, and the responses of carbon stocks for those classes, characterized as emission factors. Regardless of the approach, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) good practice guidelines specify that GHG inventories produce neither over- nor under-estimates and reduce uncertainties to the degree possible. For a study area in southeastern Norway, the objectives of the study were to compare the stock-change and gain–loss approaches with respect to estimates of carbon emissions for the aboveground biomass pool and to illustrate statistically rigorous methods for complying with the two IPCC good practice guidelines for both approaches. The primary conclusions were that the two approaches produced comparable estimates of mean annual emissions, but that the stock-change approach produced considerably smaller estimates of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model-based inference is an alternative to probability-based inference for small areas or remote areas for which probability sampling is difficult. Model-based mean square error estimators incorporate three components: prediction covariance, residual variance, and residual covariance. The latter two components are often considered negligible, particularly for large areas, but no thresholds that justify ignoring them have been reported. The objectives of the study were threefold: ( i) to compare analytical and bootstrap estimators of model parameter covariances as the primary factors affecting prediction covariance; ( ii) to estimate the contribution of residual variance to overall variance; and ( iii) to estimate thresholds for residual spatial correlation that justify ignoring this component. Five datasets were used, three from Europe, one from Africa, and one from North America. The dependent variable was either forest volume or biomass and the independent variables were either Landsat satellite image bands or airborne laser scanning metrics. Three conclusions were noteworthy: ( i) analytical estimators of the model parameter covariances tended to be biased; ( ii) the effects of residual variance were mostly negligible; and ( iii) the effects of spatial correlation on residual covariance vary by multiple factors but decrease with increasing study area size. For study areas greater than 75 km2 in size, residual covariance could generally be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a study area in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, the utilities of local and global forest maps in combination with poststratified and model-assisted estimators for increasing the precision of estimates of forest area were compared. Auxiliary information was in the form of local maps, the recent Global Forest Change map, and combinations of these maps. The poststratified estimators produced estimates of greater precision than the model-assisted regression estimators for maps of categorical variables, but the model assisted estimators produced estimates of greater precision for maps of continuous variables. The Global Forest Change map was the least accurate of all the maps, but it produced estimates of forest area that were similar to those for the other maps and that were more precise than if the map had not been used. Thus, the Global Forest Change map may be an attractive option if local maps are not available or cannot be constructed. The primary contributions of the study are two-fold. First, this is one of the first case studies that rigorously assess the utility of global maps for national estimation. After accumulation of a few more such studies, broader generalizations should be forthcoming. Second, a statistical basis is provided for the previously unexplained greater precision for poststratified estimators than for model-assisted estimators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest inventory estimates of tree volume for large areas are typically calculated by adding the model predictions of volumes for individual trees at the plot level, calculating the mean over plots, and expressing the result on a per unit area basis. The uncertainty in the model predictions is generally ignored, with the result that the precision of the large-area volume estimate is optimistic. The primary study objective was to assess the performance of a Monte Carlo based approach for estimating model prediction error that had been developed for boreal and temperate forest applications when used for a subtropical forest application. Monte Carlo simulation approaches were used because of the complexities associated with multiple sources of uncertainty, the nonlinear nature of the models, and heteroskedasticity. A related objective was to estimate the effects of model prediction uncertainty due to residual and parameter uncertainty on the large-area volume estimates for the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. The primary conclusions were fourfold. First, the methodological approach worked well. Second, the effects of model residual and parameter uncertainty on large-area estimates of mean volume per unit area were negligible for the models and calibration datasets used for the study. Third, for the models currently in use in Santa Catarina, the effects of model residual and parameter uncertainty may be ignored when calculating large-area estimates of mean volume per unit area. Fourth, differences were negligible between estimates of the mean and standard error obtained using a single, nonspecific volume model and estimates obtained using both forest-type models and species-specific/species-group models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest structural diversity was estimated for an ecological province in the north-central region of the United States of America using data for nearly 350 000 trees observed on >12 000 forest inventory plots. Each plot was 672 m2 in area, and the sampling intensity was approximately 1 plot/2400 ha. Two indices were used for each of two commonly and accurately measured inventory variables: species count and the Shannon index for tree species and standard deviation and the Shannon index for tree diameter. The primary results of the study were fourfold: (i) ranges of spatial correlation for diversity indices were small, on the order of 5–10 km, (ii) high proportions of provincewide diversity were realized for circular areas with radii as small as 15 km, (iii) diversity for both species and diameter exhibited strong northwest to southeast spatial patterns, and (iv) plot-level α diameter diversity was highly correlated with mean plot-level tree diameter. La diversité structurale de la forêt a été estimée dans une province écologique du centre-nord des tats-Unis d’Amérique en utilisant les données de près de 350 000 arbres étudiés dans plus de 12 000 placettes d’inventaire forestier. Chaque placette couvrait une superficie de 672 m2 et l’intensité d’échantillonnage était approximativement d’une placette par 2 400 ha. Deux indices ont été utilisés pour chacune des deux variables d’inventaire communément et précisément mesurées : le nombre d’espèces et l’indice de Shannon pour l’espèce d’arbre, et l’écart-type et l’indice de Shannon pour le diamètre des arbres. Quatre résultats importants peuvent être tirés de cette étude : (i) l’étendue de la corrélation spatiale des indices de diversité était faible, de l’ordre de 5 à 10 km, (ii) une proportion élevée de la diversité à l’échelle de la province a été calculée dans des surfaces circulaires dont le rayon est aussi petit que 15 km, (iii) la diversité en espèces et en diamètres avait une structure spatiale nettement définie du nord-ouest vers le sud-est et (iv) la diversité en diamètres α à l’échelle de la placette était fortement corrélée avec le diamètre moyen des arbres à l’échelle de la placette. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest inventory programs report estimates of forest variables for areas of interest ranging in size from municipalities, to counties, to states or provinces. Because of numerous factors, sample sizes are often insufficient to estimate attributes as precisely as is desired, unless the estimation process is enhanced using ancillary data. Classified satellite imagery has been shown to be an effective source of ancillary data that, when used with stratified estimation techniques, contributes to increased precision with little corresponding increase in cost. Stratification investigations conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis program of the USDA Forest Service are reviewed, and a new approach to stratification using satellite imagery is proposed. The results indicate that precision may be substantially increased for estimates of both forest area and volume per unit area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Enhanced Forest Inventory and Analysis program of the U.S. Forest Service has established a nationwide array of permanent field plots, each representing approximately 2400 ha. Each plot has been assigned to one of five interpenetrating, nonoverlapping panels, with one panel selected for measurement on a rotating basis each year. As with most large surveys, observations for some plots are not obtained. Several techniques for dealing with missing observations were compared with respect to the bias and precision of stratified estimates of mean volume per unit area using data from the State of Indiana in the north-central region of the United States for illustrative purposes. For the proportion of missing plots ranging from 1% to 10%, acceptable results were obtained for techniques that both ignored and replaced missing plot observations, but only when the techniques accounted for differences between plots in private and public ownerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a nationwide application of k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) to estimate growing stock volume per hectare for the Irish National Forest Estate using optical satellite imagery and field inventory data from the second National Forest Inventory (NFI). Two approaches are tested: an unweighted k-NN and an improved version (ik-NN) that is optimised using a genetic algorithm. The performance of the models is assessed in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE) and prediction error. From the simulations, it was found that the optimal value of k was 3, and the smallest pixel-level RMSE for growing stock was 126 m3·ha–1 when ik-NN was used. Comparisons with estimates from the NFI show that the ik-NN technique can enhance the Irish NFI. These improvements include a total estimate of growing stock volume of 102 million m3 with a confidence interval of ±3%, which is smaller than the NFI-reported confidence interval of ±5%. In addition, while total county-level estimates of growing volume estimated using ik-NN were consistent with those published from the NFI, their corresponding confidence intervals were much narrower, in the range of a two- to four-fold reduction in the width of the confidence interval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA Forest Service alters plot locations before releasing data to the public to ensure landowner confidentiality and sample integrity, but using data with altered plot locations in conjunction with other spatially explicit data layers produces analytical results with unknown amounts of error. We calculated the potential error from using altered location data in combination with other data layers that varied in mean map unit size. The incidence of errors associated with the use of altered plot locations exhibited a strong inverse relationship to the mean map unit size of the other data sets used in the analyses. For a 30 m × 30 m resolution land cover map, plot misclassification rates ranged from 32% to 66%, whereas only 1%–10% of plots were misclassified for ecological subsection data (mean polygon size 9067 km2). Housing density data derived from the US Decennial Census (mean polygon size = 5.7 km2) represented an intermediate condition, with 5%–70% of data points misclassified when altered plot locations were used. These analyses demonstrate the impacts of altering FIA plot locations and represent an important step toward making the FIA database more helpful to a broad variety of end users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis plot information is widely used for timber inventories, forest health assessments, and environmental risk analyses. With few exceptions, true plot locations are not revealed; the plot coordinates are manipulated to obscure the location of field plots and thereby preserve plot integrity. The influence of perturbed plot locations on the development and accuracy of statistical models is unknown. We tested the hypothesis that the influence is related to the spatial structure of the data used in the models. For ordinary kriging we examined the difference in mean square error based on true and perturbed plot locations across a range of spatial autocorrelations. We also examined the difference in mean square error for regression models developed with true and perturbed plot locations across a range of spatial autocorrelations and spatial resolutions. Perturbing plot locations did not significantly influence the accuracy of kriging estimates, but in some situations linear regression model development and accuracy were significantly influenced. Unless the independent variable has high spatial autocorrelation, only coarse spatial resolution data should be used to develop linear regression models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-stratification is often used to increase the precision of estimates arising from large-area forest inventories with plots established at permanent locations. Remotely sensed data and associated spatial products are often used for developing the post-stratification, which offers a mechanism to increase precision for less cost than increasing the sample size. While important variance reductions have been shown from post-stratification, it remains unknown where observed gains lie along the continuum of possible gains. This information is needed to determine whether efforts to further improve post-stratification outcomes are warranted. In this study, two types of optimal post-stratification were compared with typical production-based post-stratifications to estimate the magnitude of remaining gains possible. Although the optimal post-stratifications were derived using methods inappropriate for operational usage, the results indicated that substantial further increases in precision for estimates of both forest area and total tree biomass could be obtained with better post-stratifications. The potential gains differed by the attribute being estimated, the population being studied, and the number of strata. Practitioners seeking to optimize post-stratification face challenges, such as evaluation of numerous auxiliary data sources, temporal misalignment between plot observations and remotely sensed data acquisition, and spatial misalignment between plot locations and remotely sensed data due to positional errors in both data types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]