Proceedings Of The 1st Annual Forest Inventory And Analysis Symposium

Documents progress in developing techniques in remote sensing, statistics, information management, and analysis required for full implementation of the national Forest Inventory and Analysis programgass annual forest inventory system.

In this article, we describe in depth the analysis and solutions to manage the multiple coordinates of the sampling objects coming from the three different phases of the second Italian national forest inventory (Inventario Nazionale delle Foreste e dei serbatoi forestali di Carbonio [INFC]). In particular, this article describes the criteria used to determine the sample point coordinates of the first phase, the Global Positioning System (GPS) positioning procedure of the second phase, and the GPS-aided retrieval procedure of sample points during the third phase of the INFC.

Forests represent a remnant wilderness of high recreational value in the densely populated industrial societies, a threatened natural resource in some regions of the world and a renewable reservoir of essential raw materials for the wood processing industry. In June 1992 the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro initiated a world-wide process of negotiation with the aim of ensuring sustainable management, conservation and development of forest resources. Although there seems to be unanimous support for sustainable development from all quarters, there is no generally accepted set of indicators which allows comparisons to be made between a given situation and a desirable one. In a recent summary paper prepared by the FAO Forestry and Planning Division, Ljungman et al. (1999) find that forest resources continue to diminish, while being called upon to produce a greater range of goods and services and that calls for sustainable forest management will simply go unheeded if the legal, policy and administrative environment do not effectively control undesirable practices. Does the concept of sustainable forest management represent not much more than a magic formula for achieving consensus, a vague idea which makes it difficult to match action to rhetoric? The concept of sustainable forest management is likely to remain an imprecise one, but we can contribute to avoiding management practices that are clearly unsustainable.