Brief history of forest inventory
The beginning
In Europe, the first inventories were carried out in the 14th and 15th century. The rise of forest inventory was due to intensive mining activities which, in the vicinity of the mines, depleted the forest resource severely. It does actually not make wonder that it was a mining engineer (Carl von Carlowitz) who did also manage the forest resource around “his” mines was the first to describe in 1712 the principle of sustainability which is nowadays used in many contexts also outside forestry. The early inventories are crude assessments and not to compare with todays inventory exercises.
Gaining significance
In 19th century, forest inventories were an established component of forest management planning. Data gatherings were based mainly on visual estimation. During this period, statistical sampling was not available yet. It was only developed around 1900. The first large area inventories took place in Sweden around 1840 on provincial level and the first large area forest inventory in the tropics was carried out by Dietrich Brandis in Burma around 1860. Beginning in the 1910s national forest inventories were carried out in the Nordic countries Norway, Sweden and Finland. In these times, the forest inventories gave considerable input to the development of statistical sampling theory.
Improvements until today
Changes and progresses in forest inventory were largely fostered by the developments in the fields of statistics (sampling and modeling), remote sensing (air photos and satellite images), computers, measurement devices and also road infrastructure (increase the accessibility to remote area) and means of transportation which facilitated reaching field plots in the forest.
