Geographic Information System is a fabulous forest inventory tool as it is in dealing with mapping and geo-referencing natural resources. In view of the considerable volume of information that will be dealt with in national/global forest surveys and of the need for fast and accurate processing of data and delivery of results, GIS will be the key tool. It will be used for capturing, processing, archiving and editing cartographic, statistical, textual and photographic data.
The project requirements will be varied especially in respect to the types of data to depict in the database. The most common information that will be part of the database is:
- country boundaries as forest surveys will be conducted by country relying essentially on national expertise and facilities. Forest surveys will be national programme and execution. Therefore results will meet, in first place, national interests but will be aggregated into the global forest survey. Country boundaries will be needed for the subdivision of the country’s land mass into blocks where photo-interpretation will be carried out and second-stage samples will be withdrawn;
- ecological zones boundaries. It is important that results of the survey will be produced by ecological zone for the purposes of describing the current situation of the resources in environmental, economic and social terms and detecting general trends;
- polygons created through classification of vegetation on remotely sensed data (satellite imagery or aerial photography) should be digitised for area measurement and filed sample selection and location and extraction of geographic co-ordinates of field plots for plot location on the ground using GPS equipment;
- field data collected on various characteristics of the trees, forests, sites and local population will be depicted in the database, processed and attached to country, ecological zone, and vegetation class.
Database developed at 2 levels:
Theoretically, every country will dispose of a database on its forest resources. However for those where a dbase will not be established for some reasons (e.g. economically not justifiable), FAO will be the venue where a world-wide data will be processed and stored, and results published per country, ecological zone, continent or for planetary levels.
