Forecasting wood resources on the basis of national forest inventory data.Application to Pinus pinaster Ait. in southwestern France

The objective of this paper is to propose a method for simulating and predi cting the evolution of wood resources in the 'Landes de Gascogne' region. L emoine's growth and yield model has been successfully utilized to predict f uture timber resources from existing data collected in two successive surve ys (1977 and 1988) conducted by the National Forest Inventory (NFI). Lemoin e's model was calibrated by analysing the error in estimation of stand feat ures between the NFI plots and experimental plots originally used to built Lemoine's model. The proposed corrected term is based on the best linear un biased predictor of the error. The calibrated model exhibited a better accu racy than the original model version. We suggest that coupling the calibrat ed Lemoine's model with NFI data is a useful method for predicting timber r esources at a regional level.