Abstract
National Forest Inventory and forest assessments are attracting increasing attention owing to their role in providing information related to manifold forest functions. There is a high demand for global information about forests and multiple services that these ecosystems provide. Of particular, current interest are forest assessment systems at national level by countries that wish to engage themselves in the REDD+ initiative. The discipline of Forest Inventory has developed a versatile toolbox of techniques and methods useful for national-level forest assessments. This chapter presents a brief overview of the National Forest Inventory (NFI) in India vis-à-vis some other developed countries and highlights the proposed changes in plot design while revising NFI in India. Some new initiatives by Forest Survey of India have also been highlighted. With an increase in requirement of information and new technological developments, a constant adaptation of the NFI framework and introduction of the new NFI design for India is essential. The new NFI for India has been designed to cope with changing contexts, new technical developments and the unique socio-ecological conditions in India. The details of the new design with a focus on terrestrial assessments using field plots of different sizes and shapes are presented. It is shown why concentric circular plots, which are widely used in the Northern Hemisphere, are found unsuitable for the species-rich forests of India. The particular structure of the new Indian NFI is also briefly discussed and compared with other large-scale NFI’s as well as global Big Data initiatives. A unique feature of the new Indian NFI is an integrated system of temporary and permanent field plots. Permanent observational plots are designed to monitor forest change and complement the network of temporary field plots.
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Tewari, V.P., Kumar, R., v. Gadow, K. (2020). National Forest Inventory in India: Developments Toward a New Design to Meet Emerging Challenges. In: Chandra, G., Nautiyal, R., Chandra, H. (eds) Statistical Methods and Applications in Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1476-0_2
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