Viva California!!
“go to the California coast it is beautiful and sunny…” well much like a duck the posse of Penguins from FSD that went to California were met with rain which rolled nicely off of there backs. But it wasn’t a vacation anyway. Best of all the GPS only tried to kill us once. Definite wrong turn in Albuquerque. One project was to review inventory procedures for a stratified stand based inventory. Like that segue? last week we talked about Continuous Forest Inventory this week we move on to the next type of inventory.
This would be a Stand Based stratified inventory. The main difference here is instead of points you have polygons that were delineated from remotely sensed data. Typically aerial photography.
What is done is someone makes a decision that these pixels look like those pixels so we will assume them to be the same. This will result in a mosaic of polygons of varying sizes across the ownership.
To populate these polygons with data a series of temporary inventory plots are taken and “compiled” to get a polygon average.
So we have gone from a point that by definition has no variability to a polygon that has several points and therefore can have a measure of variability.
This method works well with forestry and other natural resource management because typically treatments happen in an area so these polygons can change through time or a manager can know what is going to be in a sale while capturing variability in that sale to get a comfortable answer. Another advantage is the temporary plots. When management happens the temporary plots are treated just as everything else. After all they were just temporary.
Experience here has also shown that small pockets of importance for whatever reason will get sampled through this method unlike the CFI method.
So at the end of the day which is better. Well no one but you can answer that. These inventory methods are used for very different reasons and provide different results. Just don’t use one or the other for something it wasn’t designed for.