Forests represent a remnant wilderness of high recreational value in the densely populated industrial societies, a threatened natural resource in some regions of the world and a renewable reservoir of essential raw materials for the wood processing industry. In June 1992 the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro initiated a world-wide process of negotiation with the aim of ensuring sustainable management, conservation and development of forest resources. Although there seems to be unanimous support for sustainable development from all quarters, there is no generally accepted set of indicators which allows comparisons to be made between a given situation and a desirable one. In a recent summary paper prepared by the FAO Forestry and Planning Division, Ljungman et al. (1999) find that forest resources continue to diminish, while being called upon to produce a greater range of goods and services and that calls for sustainable forest management will simply go unheeded if the legal, policy and administrative environment do not effectively control undesirable practices. Does the concept of sustainable forest management represent not much more than a magic formula for achieving consensus, a vague idea which makes it difficult to match action to rhetoric? The concept of sustainable forest management is likely to remain an imprecise one, but we can contribute to avoiding management practices that are clearly unsustainable.

Forest inventories throughout the world have evolved gradually over time. The content as well as the concepts and de?nitions employed are constantly adapted to the users’ needs. Advanced inventory systems have been established in many countries within Europe, as well as outside Europe, as a result of development work spanning several decades, in some cases more than 100 years. With continuously increasing international agreements and commitments, the need for information has also grown drastically, and reporting requests have become more frequent and the content of the reports wider. Some of the agreements made at the international level have direct impacts on national economies and international decisions, e. g. , the Kyoto Protocol. Thus it is of utmost importance that the forest information supplied is collected and analysed using sound scienti?c principles and that the information from different countries is comparable. European National Forest Inventory (NFI) teams gathered in Vienna in 2003 to discuss the new challenges and the measures needed to get data users to take full advantage of existing NFIs. As a result, the European National Forest Inventory Network (ENFIN), a network of NFIs, was established. The ENFIN members decided to apply for funding for meetings and collaborative activities. COST– European Cooperation in Science and Technology - provided the necessary ?n- cial means for the realization of the program.

Climate change shaped the political agenda during the last decade with three issues as hot topics: commonly making the headlines: carbon budgets, impact and mitigation of climate change. Given the significant role that forests play in the climate system – as sources, sinks, and through carbon trading – this book update the current scientific evidences on the relationships between climate, forest resources and forest management practices around the world. By including the forest scientists’ expertise from around the world, the book presents and updates a depth analysis of the current knowledge, and a series of case studies focused on the biological and the economic impacts of climate change in forest ecosystems in Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America. The book will form a valuable resource for researchers and advanced students dealing with sustainable forestry, climate change issues and the effects of climate change on natural resource management.

This book presents the state-of-the-art of forest resources assessments and monitoring. It provides links to practical applications of forest and natural resource assessment programs. It offers an overview of current forest inventory systems and discusses forest mensuration, sampling techniques, remote sensing applications, geographic and forest information systems, and multi-resource forest inventory. Attention is also given to the quantification of non-wood goods and services.

The book presents the current state and good practices of national forest inventories in monitoring wood resources and demonstrates pathways for harmonisation and improved common reporting. Beyond a general overview over availability and use of wood resources in different countries, it provides a unique collection of original contributions from national forest inventory experts with in-depth descriptions of current NFI methods in assessing wood availability and wood use in European countries, and selected countries from America and Asia.The main topics are national definitions and improvements in common reporting of forests available for wood supply, stem quality and assortments, estimation of change including growth and drain, and tree resources outside forest land. The book is a must-have for everyone who is contributing to national forest inventories either methodologically or operatively, for people who want or need to understand national forest inventory provided data and information on the availability of wood resources. By providing profound knowledge it is a valuable basis for scientists involved in scenario modelling and analysing effects of climate change, as well as individuals in private organisations and public administrations promoting the sustainable use of natural resources and the potential of green economy.

Building on more than a decade of innovative research into multi-source forest inventory (MS-NFI) this book presents full details of the development, outputs and applications of the improved k-NN method. The method, which was pioneered in Finland in 1990, is rapidly becoming a world standard in forest inventory, having been adopted as standard in Finland and Sweden, and recently introduced in Austria and across the US. The book describes in detail the full MS-NFI process, and the input data used – including field data, satellite images, and digital map data, as well as coarse-scale variation of forest variables. It also presents comprehensive information on the types of outputs which can be derived, including maps and statistics, describing, for example, stock volumes and development, dominant tree species, age-class distribution, and large and small-scale variation. The book will provide an invaluable resource for those involved in forest inventory, including government departments and bodies involved in forest policy, management and monitoring, forest managers, and researchers and graduate students interested in forest inventory, modelling and analysis. It will find an additional market among those interested in Earth observation, ecology and broader areas of environmental and natural resource management. Erkki Tomppo was the winner of the 1997 Marcus Wallenberg Prize for his work on the k-NN method.

Forest biodiversity is crucial to the ecological, economic, and social well-being of earth’s civilisations. Unfortunately, however, forest biodiversity is threatened to a serious degree in nearly all countries. Therefore, many countries have agreed to be parties to international agreements focused on maintaining, restoring, and monitoring biodiversity; further, these countries have agreed to report to international bodies on forest biodiversity status and trends. NFIs are the primary source of large-scale information available for this purpose, but the large variety of definitions, protocols, sampling designs, and plot configurations used by NFIs makes comparable international reporting extremely difficult. This book presents the results of Working Group 3 of COST Action E43 in the development of harmonization techniques for common reporting of estimates of forest biodiversity indicators using NFI data. Harmonization tests were carried out on a large common data base containing raw NFI data from 13 European countries and the USA. With its collection of practical examples for the estimation of forest biodiversity indicators, it's a practical tool for anyone involved in forest inventories and in forest resource monitoring and management as well as for those involved in biodiversity assessment and reporting.