The Spanish National Forest Inventory: history, development, challenges and perspectives

Abstract

É importante ter uma base de dados florestal estatisticamente robusta, que possa ser atualizada e possa fornecer informações em longo prazo. Os inventários florestais nacionais (IFN) fornecem uma das melhores fontes de informação de larga escala e, portanto, são a base para políticas florestais. O escopo dos IFNs, que são a principal fonte de dados para avaliações nacionais e de grandes áreas, foi ampliado para incluir novas variáveis, visando atender a crescentes requisitos de informação. Este artigo descreve a história, metodologia e as orientações do IFN espanhol e os requisitos internacionais. Os objetivos atuais são determinados através da análise das perspectivas futuras e possível orientação de avaliações futuras. Estes objetivos incluem a harmonização do IFN, fonte aberta de dados e ampliação do número de variáveis de campo monitoradas (inventário multiobjetivo), a fim de efetivamente cumprir aos requisitos de informação.

Analysis of the occurrence of wildfires in the Iberian Peninsula based on harmonised data from national forest inventories

“…Since the Third SNFI3, forest area and strata estimation are described prior to the NFI using the National Forest Map . Although the primary objectives were the estimation of forest area and growing stock, the current aim of the SNFI is to provide information at national and regional levels about the state and evolution of forests through the analysis of growing stock, carbon pools, development of forest resources, forest health, risks and forest biodiversity (Alberdi et al 2017).…”

“…In Spain, due to the increasing national and international forest information requirements, the number of measured variables and objectives was broadened, including vertical structure. New methodologies were developed taking into consideration the national forest characteristics, the information requirements but also the National Forest Inventories harmonisation initiatives (Vidal et al 2016;Alberdi et al 2017…”

“…Current fire behaviour models require information on the several structure variables, and some studies have addressed the importance of stand structure as the main driver of fire vulnerability (Keyes and O'Hara 2002;Fernandes 2009). In fact, NFIs are important tools to provide information on status and trends on a variety of parameters describing forests and forest uses and represents the most complete spatial distribution of many stand and tree variables (ICNF 2013;Álvarez-González et al 2014;Alberdi et al 2017). Nevertheless, information about vertical structure of forests is often collected in a non-harmonised way across countries, situation that compromises the comparability and reinforces the need to develop harmonised methodologies for assessing fuel loads in the vertical strata.…”

Integration of National Forest Inventory and Nationwide Airborne Laser Scanning Data to Improve Forest Yield Predictions in North-Western Spain

“…Trees with 2.5 ≤ dbh ≤ 7.5 cm were counted but not measured. For more details about the SNFI data, see Alberdi et al [34].…”

“…Thus, for example, Murgaš et al [41] reported that up to 10% of the plots had positioning errors of 20 m or more within inventories of selected management units in Slovakia. As revisiting SNFI plots to capture more accurate coordinates is very costly and time-consuming, Spanish authorities are planning to capture new coordinates with errors less than 1 m in the next re-measurement of SNFI plots [26,42], thus making it easier to combine the field plot data with the information provided by remote sensing systems [34].…”