The National Forest Inventory of the United States of America

The mission of the Forest Inventory and Analyis (FIA) program of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, is to conduct the national forest inventory of the United States of America for purposes of estimating the area of forest land; the volume, growth, and removal of forest resources; and the health of the forest. Users of FIA data, estimates, and related products include land managers, policy and decision-makers, forest industry, environmental organizations, and university researchers. To accomplish its mission, the FIA program has established a sampling design with an intensity of approximately one permanent plot per 2,400 ha across the entire country. Depending on the region of the country, each plot is remeasured at intervals of five or 10 years. The program releases data annually and reports estimates at the county level for each state every five years. Due to budgetary constraints and natural variability among plot observations, sufficient numbers of plots cannot be measured to satisfy precision guidelines for the estimates of many variables unless the estimation process is enhanced using ancillary data. Classified satellite imagery has been demonstrated to be a source of ancillary data that can be used with stratified estimation techniques to increase the precision of estimates with little corresponding increase in costs. A crucial factor restricting the utility of FIA data is that the exact locations of inventory plots cannot be released to the public. Thus, users are generally not able to obtain estimates for small areas or for their own areas of interest if exact plot locations are required. To compensate, satellite imagery, inventory plot data, and the k-Nearest Neighbors technique are being used to construct Internet-based maps of forest attributes from which estimates for arbitrary user-defined areas of interest may be obtained.