Developing and testing a national system for inventory of timber resources and biomass/carbon stocks combining airborne laser and field data

The National Forest Inventory (NFI) is responsible for national statistics of the timber resources. The present inventory is based on an extensive sample of field plots. The NFI is facing three major challenges; 1) to reduce costs by, e.g., adopting remot e sensing, 2) to provide resource estimates at local scales (sub-county or municipality) to support the public forest administration and 3) to provide estimates of forest carbon stocks to meet the Kyoto protocol requirements. This includes carbon estimate s of thousands of km2 of mountain forest above the official tree line, which is currently not a part of any national monitoring systems. The overall scientific aim of this project is to develop and demonstrate a cost-efficient method for forest inventory that responds to these challenges. Airborne laser is a rapidly evolving remote sensing technology with great potential for precise estimation of timber resources/biomass because lasers have the ability to depict the three-dimensional structure of trees an d forest canopies. Vegetation height and -density are highly correlated with volume/biomass. Recent research at UMB and NASA has demonstrated that laser scanning (UMB) and -profiling (NASA) can provide precise estimates of volume/biomass over large areas. In this project, a laser scanning-based sampling method for inventory of volume/biomass will be developed. The method will be demonstrated in Hedmark county (26,000 km2). Its performance will be compared with a profiling laser (NASA) and official NFI sta tistics. Sub-county and mountain forest estimates will be provided. This research will be conducted by an international team of leading scientists. It will provide "a proof of the concept" and be considered as a first reference of method for similar effor ts elsewhere in the boreal forest zone.