Remote Sensing supporting national forest inventories NFA

This chapter deals with the integration of remote sensing data for national forest inventories. It will give a basic understanding of how remote sensing can be integrated in national forest inventories (NFA) and what aspects are important. It will give an overview of different remote sensing systems, data types, the advantages and disadvantages as well as future developments. Remote sensing data have been used in forest inventories for a long time. In fact, forestry people were the first, after the military sector, to use remote sensing data to a larger extent in order to support their inventory tasks. If we talk about remote sensing, all air-borne and spaceborne instruments for earth observation are included, from analogue aerial photography to space-borne digital instruments like synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and opto-electronical systems. Not included in this definition are satellite positioning or navigation systems and terrestrial remote sensing systems like terrestrial photogrammetry or terrestrial laser scanning. Navigation or positioning systems, as well as terrestrial remote sensing systems, are of increasing importance for sampling and sample based field measurements, therefore they cannot be neglected when the use of remote sensing is described for NFAs. However, this is not what most people refer to when talking about remote sensing, and it will not be included in this chapter. .