The Norwegian area frame survey of land cover and outfield land resources (AR18X18), completed in 2014, provided unbiased statistics of land cover in Norway. The article reports the new statistics, discusses implications of the data set, and provides potential value in terms of research, management, and monitoring. A gridded sampling design for 1081 primary statistical units of 0.9 km 2 at 18 km intervals was implemented in the survey. The plots were mapped in situ, aided by aerial photos, and all areas were coded following a vegetation type system. The results provide new insights into the cover and distribution of vegetation and land cover types. The statistic for mire and wetlands, which previously covered 5.8%, has since been corrected to 8.9%. The survey results can be used for environmental and agricultural management, and the data can be stratified for regional analyses. The survey data can also serve as training data for remote sensing and distribution modelling. Finally, the survey data can be used to calibrate vegetation perturbations in climate change research that focuses on atmospheric-vegetation feedback. The survey documented novel land cover statistics and revealed that the national cover of wetlands had previously been underestimated.

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There is a growing demand for reliable information about land cover and land resources. The Norwegian area frame survey of land cover and outfield land resources (AR18X18) is a response to this demand. AR18X18 provides unbiased land cover and land resource statistics and constitutes a baseline for studying changes in outfield land resources in Norway and a framework for a national land resource accounting system for the outfields. The area frame survey uses a systematic sampling technique with 0.9 km 2 sample plots at 18 km intervals. A complete wall-to-wall land cover map of an entire plot surveyed is obtained in situ by a team of fieldworkers equipped with aerial photographs. The use of sample plots with extended coverage (0.9 km 2 ) ensures that the survey also deals with local variation, thus strengthening the estimates well beyond simple point sampling. The article documents the methodology used in the survey, followed by a discussion of issues raised by the choice of methodology. These issues include the problem of calculating uncertainty and a confidence interval for the estimates, the focus on common rather than rare land cover categories, and the prospect of downscaling the results in order to obtain statistics for subnational regions.

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