National
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Inventory
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[Finnish]METLA
METLA Research
THE RESULTS OF THE NATIONAL FOREST INVENTORY
The Finnish National Forest Inventory has produced measurement based time series, statistics, maps, and publications on forest resources, forest conditions and forest ecosystem on regional and national level over 70 years.Examples of statistics are: area distribution of land use classes, area distribution of forestry land , area distribution by stand characteristics like site fertility, age, species , development classes and silvicultural quality, all by regions and by ownership categories. Information of forest health conditions is included as well. Some inventories have produced detailed information on distribution of ground vegetation and animals.
Volumes of growing stock and increment . are given, for example, by tree species, by ownership categories, by some stand charactersitics and, growing stock volumes, also by timber assortments.
Based on the information of National Forest Inventory, the MELA -project produces alternative timber production programs and predicts the corresponding volume and increment development. An example of an alternative wood production program is Forest 2000 program.
The new multi-source inventory produces information at municiple level (typically some 10 000 hectares) and and by request for even smaller areas as well as thematic maps of an arbitrary scale. Typical examples of thematic maps are dominant tree species, volume of growing stock , volumes by timber assortments, and age .
The information of inventories has given a firm foundation for planning the forest industries and the utilization and management of the forests. By the new methods, the inventory is changin from the temporary field measurements based system into an up-to-date, multi-source forest resource, forest ecosystem and forest health monitoring and forest management planning system. In addition to the traditional written publications of statistics and graphics, the results are distributed as analog and digital thematic maps. The new products create new co-operation ways between practical forestry and forest research.
VKan, December 2000