INCORPORATING PREDICTIONS INTO AN ANNUAL FOREST INVENTORY

Growth modeling of forests at the individual tree and stand levels is a highly refined procedure for many forest types. A method to incorpor ate predictions from such models into a forest inventory system is dev eloped. Variance components from the actual measurements and from the predicted measurements are used to estimate the variance of the combin ed predicted value. The only assumption required to justify this metho d is that the model estimate has a bias that does not change from one time period to the next. The estimation procedure proposed here can al so incorporate remotely sensed information via a regression estimator.