Forest inventories, introduced in the Nordic Countries as early as in the 1920s, have provided information about the forest area, the volume, structure and health of the growing stock, as well as the state of the forest. The information needs directed to the inventories today have grown due to the demands for increased efficiency in timber production and preservation of the forest ecosystems. The demand for products of the wood-processing industry creates a pressure to intensify both the production of timber and the use of the forest resources. At the same time, maintaining the biodiversity of the forests has grown increasingly topical.
Forests are also important for reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We need more detailed information about forests more frequently, and from ever smaller areas. Forest inventories present challenges to the development of statistical methods. In his presentation professor Tomppo will highlight the statistical problems in the implementation of forest inventories, e.g. the multi-level spatial and temporal variation of the forests and the abundance of the variables an inventory must measure. Today's inventories are made more efficient by combining field measurements with remote sensing data or other numerical spatial data. The increased amount of data makes the methods statistically even more interesting.