Comments on biological and environmental data sets required for the Australian national forest inventory

Our concern is that the National Forest Inventory (NFI) takes advantage of recent developments in resource evaluation and spatial analysis technologies. In this context, biological and environmental data sets and methods of quantitative, spatial prediction relevant to the NFI are discussed. The range of questions that the NFI will be used to address will define the critical forest attributes that need to be recorded. Four data types (biological, physical environmental, cadastral and infrastructural, land-use and socio-economic) will be required to account for the biophysical components and interactions between forests and the activities of humans. Access to data that permit the evaluation of conservation criteria (e.g. diversity, representativeness, wilderness) at any nominated place in the forest estate will be as important as access to data for deriving estimates of stand productivity, timber volume and so on. A tested methodology is available to systematically evaluate these aspects. This permits the development and application of a minimum data set (MDS) of primary attribute data that are largely within the Commonwealth government’s control. New research demonstrates that data sets containing common site-based estimates of the spatial variability within forests of environmental (climate, topography and soil/regolith/substrate) and biological attributes (forest cover; distribution, abundance and productivity of biota; forest-community form and architecture) will be important to the NFI. The application of these data sets are illustrated briefly in a case study considering the spatial prediction of important habitat for Leadbeater’s Possum in the Central Highlands of Victoria. Vegetation classification should be considered as an output following analysis and evaluation, rather than as an input to a spatial data base. Site-specific observations or measurements of vegetation attributes stored in the NFI’s data base could provide the basis for generating any number of classifications. Therefore, a priority task in establishing the NFI should be to define the most appropriate vegetation attributes and to acquire suitable forest-site data. Similarly, it will be important to define a MDS and acquire data for characterising fauna habitat within forests.